CHAPTER 11
CHRONOLOGY
c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composed
c. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composed
327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asia
c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty
c. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns
c. 250 BCE The Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra
c. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends
c. 185 BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty
73 BCE The Shunga dynasty ends
c. 150 BCE The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are built
c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks and Scythians enter India
Dharma is subtle.
Mahabharata, passim
THE SUBTLETY OF DHARMA
Some Hindus will tell you that the Mahabharata is about the five Pandava brothers, some that it is about the incarnate god Krishna. But most Hindu traditions will tell you that it is about dharma; sometimes they call it a history (itihasa), but sometimes a dharma text (dharma-shastra). To say that the long sermons on dharma are a digression from the story, a late and intrusive padding awkwardly stuck onto a zippy epic plot, would be like saying that the arias in a Verdi opera are unwelcome interruptions of the libretto; dharma, like the aria, is the centerpiece, for which the narration (the recitative) is merely the frame.
Time and again when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrong choice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter or be told, “Dharma is subtle” (sukshma), thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked. People try again and again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is. “What is dharma?” asked Yudhishthira, and did not stay for an answer. As one of the early dharma texts put it, “Right and wrong [dharma and adharma] do not go about saying, ‘Here we are’; nor do gods, Gandharvas, or ancestors say, ‘This is right, that is wrong.’”1 The Mahabharata deconstructs dharma, exposing the inevitable chaos of the moral life.
Dharma had already been somewhat codified from between the third and first centuries BCE, when the dharma-sutras set forth, in prose, the rules of social life and religious observance.2 By now the Brahmins were circling the wagons against the multiple challenges of Buddhist dhamma (the teachings of the Buddha), Ashokan Dhamma (the code carved on inscriptions and preserved in legends), Upanishadic moksha, yoga, and the wildfire growth of Hindu sects. Buddhists presented their own ideas about what they called (in Pali) dhamma, ideas that overlapped with but were certainly not the same as Hindu ideas about dharma. Before Buddhism became an issue, there had been no need to define dharma in great detail. But now there was such a need, for the Buddha called his own religion the dhamma, and eventually dharma came to mean, among other things, one’s religion (so that Hindus would later speak of Christianity as the Christian dharma).
Dharma continued to denote the sort of human activity that leads to human prosperity, victory, and glory, but now it also had much more to do. For now the text was often forced to acknowledge the impossibility of maintaining any sort of dharma at all in a world where every rule seemed to be canceled out by another. The narrators kept painting themselves into a corner with the brush of dharma. Their backs to the wall, they could only reach for another story.
THE KARMA OF DHARMA
Dharma is not merely challenged in the abstract; as a god he is also called to account, for even Dharma has karma, in the sense of the moral consequences of his actions. Dharma (which can often best be translated as “justice”) at this time was clearly being assailed on all sides by competing agendas that challenged the justice of justice, as this story does:
MANDAVYA AT THE STAKE
There was once a Brahmin named Mandavya, an expert on dharma, who had kept a vow of silence for a long time. One day robbers hid in his house, and when he refused to break his vow to tell the police where they were, and the police then found the robbers hiding there, the king passed judgment on Mandavya along with the thieves: “Kill him.” The executioners impaled the great ascetic on a stake. The Brahmin, who was the very soul of dharma, remained on the stake for a long time. Though he had no food, he did not die; he willed his life’s breaths to remain within him, until the king came to him and said, “Greatest of sages, please forgive me for the mistake that I made in my delusion and ignorance.” The sage forgave him, and the king had him taken down from the stake. But he was unable to pull the stake out, and so he cut it off at its base, thinking it might come in useful for carrying things like flower baskets. And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, and entrails, and people used to call him “Tip-of-the-Stake” Mandavya.
Mandavya went to the house of Dharma and scolded him, saying, “What did I do, without knowing what I had done, something so bad that it earned me such retribution?” Dharma said, “You stuck blades of grass up the tails of little butterflies when you were a child, and this is the fruit of that karma.” Then Mandavya said, “For a rather small offense you have given me an enormous punishment. Because of that, Dharma, you will be born as a man, in the womb of a Shudra. And I will establish a moral boundary for the fruition of dharma in the world: no sin will be counted against anyone until the age of fourteen (1.101; cf. 1.57.78-71).”
That the Brahmin who knows dharma is mightier than the king should not surprise anyone who has been following the Vedic texts, but that a man who trots around cheerfully with a stake through his intestines is mightier even than the god Dharma himself is worthy of note. The moral law is stupid—children should not be so grotesquely punished for their mischief, even when it involves cruelty to insects—and so the moral law must undergo its own expiation. Dharma, the god, must undergo the curse for miscarriage of dharma. Being born as a human is different both from fathering a child (as Dharma fathers Yudhishthira) and from spinning off an incarnation (as Vishnu does for Rama and Krishna), for when Dharma is born on earth (as Vidura; see below), he ceases to exist in heaven until Vidura dies; that is the nature of the curse. That being born of a Shudra is a terrible curse, one from which you cannot escape in this life, is an attitude that endorses the extant class system. On the other hand, the Mahabharata challenges that system by imagining that the moral law might become incarnate in a person born of a woman of the lowest class, a Shudra mother. It also implicitly challenges the ideal of nonviolence toward animals, implying that you can take it too far; people are not the same as animals, and so impaling a butterfly (anally) is not as serious as impaling a man (also anally, by implication).
THE TRANSFER OF KARMA
That even Dharma has karma is an indication of how powerful a force karma had become. Buddhism in this period was already preaching the transfer of merit from one person to another, and early Hindu texts too had hinted at such a possibility. TheMahabharata totters on the brink of a full-fledged concept of the transfer of karma, in a passage that takes up the story after Yudhishthira has entered heaven (with Dharma, no longer incarnate as a dog). There he was in for an unpleasant surprise:
YUDHISHTHIRA IN HEAVEN AND HELL
When Yudhishthira, the dharma king, reached the triple-tiered heaven, he did not see his brothers or Draupadi. He asked where his brothers were, and Draupadi, and the gods commanded their messenger to take him to them. The messenger took Yudhishthira to hell, where he saw hideous tortures. Unable to abide the heat and the stench of corpses, he turned to go, but then he heard the voices of his brothers and Draupadi crying, “Stay here, as a favor to us, just for a little while. A sweet breeze from your body wafts over us and brings us relief.” Yudhishthira wondered if he was dreaming or out of his mind, but he determined to stay there, to help them.
The gods, with Dharma himself, came to him, and everything disappeared—the darkness, the tortures, everything. Indra said to Yudhishthira, “My son, inevitably all kings must see hell. People who have a record of mostly bad deeds enjoy the fruits of their good deeds first, in heaven, and go to hell afterward. Others experience hell first and go afterward to heaven. You saw hell, and your brothers and Draupadi all went to hell, just in the form of a deception. Come now to heaven.” And Dharma said, “I tested you before by taking on the form of a dog, and now this was another test, for you chose to stay in hell for the sake of your brothers.” And so Yudhishthira went with Dharma and the gods, and plunged into the heavenly Ganges, and shed his human body. And then he stayed there with his brothers and Draupadi. Eventually, they all reached the worlds beyond which there is nothing (18.1-5).
Yudhishthira’s ability to ease his brothers’ torments takes the form of a cool, sweet breeze that counteracts the hot, putrid air of hell, through a kind of transfer of merit.fr He therefore wants to stay with his brothers in hell, even though he himself does not belong there, just as he wanted to stay with the dog outside heaven, again where he did not belong. Elsewhere in the Mahabharata (3.128), when a king wants to take over the guilt of his priest in hell (an interesting role reversal: The priest had sacrificed a child so that the king could get a hundred sons), Dharma protests, “No one ever experiences the fruit of another person’s deed.” The king, however, insists on living in hell along with the priest for the same term, and eventually both he and the priest go to heaven. He does not save the priest from suffering, but he suffers with him. In the case of Yudhishthira in hell, this time no one tries to persuade him; they all learned how stubborn he was the last time. What, then, is the solution? A sure sign of a moral impasse in any narrative is the invocation of the “it was just a dream” motif at the end, erasing the aporia entirely. Another is the deus ex machina. TheMahabharata invokes both here, a double red flag (triple if we count the two gods plus the illusion).
But the illusory cop-out—it wasn’t really a dog; it wasn’t really hell—is contradicted by the need for people to expiate their sins in a real hell. The heroes go to hell, go to heaven, and in the end go on to worlds “beyond which there is nothing,” a phrase that speaks in the tantalizing negatives of the Upanishads and leaves us in the dark about the nature of those worlds. Janamejaya, to whom the story is told, asks a set of questions about the “levels of existence” (gatis)—that is, the various sorts of lives into which one can be reborn: “How long did the Pandavas remain in heaven? Or did they perhaps have a place there that would last forever? Or at the end of their karma what level of existence did they reach? (18.5.4-5).” The bard does not really answer these questions, but the reference to the worlds “beyond which there is nothing” and the fact that they are not said to be reborn on earth imply that their karma did come to an end, in worlds that are the equivalent of moksha. The authors of the Mahabharata are thinking out loud, still trying to work it all out. They are keeping their minds open, refusing to reach a final verdict on a subject—the complex function of karma—on which the jury is still out.
DHARMA, MOKSHA, AND BHAKTI IN THE GITA
Dharma needed all the subtlety it could muster to meet the challenges of Buddhism but even more those of moksha, which had made major headway since the early Upanishads. Ideas about both dharma and moksha had been in the air for centuries, but now they were brought into direct confrontation with each other, in the Bhagavad Gita.
The Gita is a conversation between Krishna and Arjuna on the brink of the great battle. Krishna had been gracious enough to offer to be Arjuna’s charioteer, an inferior position, though appropriate to Krishna’s quasi-Brahmin nature. fs Arjuna, assailed by many of the doubts that plagued Ashoka,3 asks Krishna a lot of difficult, indeed unanswerable age-old questions about violence and nonviolence, this time in the context of the battlefield, questioning the necessity of violence for warriors. The sheer number of different reasons that Krishna gives to Arjuna, including the argument that since you cannot kill the soul, killing the body in war (like killing an animal in sacrifice) is not really killing, is evidence for the author’s deep disquiet about killing and the need to justify it. The moral impasse is not so much resolved as blasted away when after Krishna has given a series of complex and rather abstract answers, Arjuna asks him to show him his true cosmic nature. Krishna shows him his doomsday form, and Arjuna cries out, “I see your mouths with jagged tusks, and I see all of these warriors rushing blindly into your gaping mouths, like moths rushing to their death in a blazing fire. Some stick in the gaps between your teeth, and their heads are ground to powder (11.25-290).” And right in the middle of the terrifying epiphany, Arjuna apologizes to Krishna for all the times that he had rashly and casually called out to him, saying, “Hey, Krishna! Hey, pal!” He begs the god to turn back into his pal Krishna, which the god consents to do.
The worshiper (represented by Arjuna) is comforted by the banality, the familiarity of human life, but inside the text, the warrior with ethical misgivings has been persuaded to kill, just as the god kills, and outside the text, the reader or hearer has been persuaded that since war is unreal, it is not evil. And this political message is made palatable by the god’s resumption of his role as an intimate human companion. The Mahabharata as a whole is passionately against war, vividly aware of the tragedy of war, despite the many statements that violence is necessary. Nor, despite the way that Krishna persuades Arjuna to fight, is the Gita used in India to justify war; it is generally taken out of context and used only for its philosophy, which can be used to support arguments for peace, as, notably, in the hands of Gandhi.
Krishna’s broader teaching in the Gita resolves the tension between dharma and moksha by forming a triad with bhakti (worship, love, devotion) as the third member, mediating between the other two terms of the dialectic. When Arjuna can choose neither dharma (he doesn’t want to kill his relatives) nor renunciation (he is a Kshatriya), Krishna offers him a third alternative, devotion. The Gita sets out a paradigm of three paths (margas) to salvation, also called three yogas: karma (works, rituals), jnana (cognate with “knowledge” and “gnosis”), and bhakti (2.49, 3.3). Karma contains within it the worldly Vedic path of rebirth, the world of dharma (here, as elsewhere, functioning as the equivalent of sva-dharma), in contrast with jnana, which represents the meditational, transcendent Vedantic path of Release, the world of moksha.ft Bhakti bridges the conflicting claims of the original binary opposition between what Luther would have called works (karma) and faith (jnana). But each member of the triad of jnana, karma, and bhakti was regarded by its adherents as the best, if not the only, path to salvation. One way in which bhakti modifies moksha is by introducing into the Upanishadic formula—that you are brahman (the divine substance of the universe)—a god with qualities (sa-guna) who allows you to love the god without qualities (nir-guna). By acting with devotion to Krishna, Arjuna is freed from the hellish consequences of his actions.
The Gita employs some Buddhist terminology (“nirvana,” for instance, the blowing out of a flame, which is a more Buddhist way of saying moksha), and Arjuna starts out with what might appear to be a quasi-Buddhist attitude that Krishna demolishes. But “nirvana” is also a Hindu word (found, for example, in the Upanishads), and it is the tension within Hinduism itself that the Gita is addressing, the challenge to assimilate the ascetic ideal into the ideology of an upper-class householder.4 The Gita’s brilliant solution to this problem is to urge Arjuna (and the reader/hearer of the Gita) to renounce not the actions but their fruits, to live with “karma without kama,” actions without desires. This is a way to maintain a renouncer’s state of mind, a spiritual state of mind, in the midst of material life, a kind of moral Teflon that blocks the consequences of actions. “Karma without kama” means not that one should not desire certain results from one’s actions, but merely that one should not expect the results (for so much is out of our control) or, more important, regard the results as the point; it’s the journey that counts, not where you end up.fu In the Gita, this means that each of us must perform our own sva-dharma—in Arjuna’s case, to kill his kinsmen in battle—with the attitude of a renunciant. This is a far cry from the social ethics of Buddhism. “Had the Buddha been the charioteer,” says Romila Thapar, “the message would have been different.”5
CASTE AND CLASS CONFLICTS
The adherence to one’s own dharma that the Gita preaches is part of a new social system that was taking shape at this time,6 the system of castes, which could not be neatly and automatically subsumed as subcategories of classes (though Manu tried to do it [10.8-12]). Class (varna) and caste (jati) began to form a single, though not yet a unified, social system. New communities were beginning to coalesce, their identities defined by a shared occupation and caste status, or by religious sectarian affiliation, or by the use of a particular language.7 Most of the castes probably derived from clans or guilds, in which, increasingly, families specialized in professions. (The Sanskrit word for caste, jati, means “birth.”) But other castes might have consisted of alien sects, tribes, and professions, of people of various geographical, sectarian, and economic factions. Now invaders like the Shakas or Kushanas and tribal forest dwellers like the Nishadas, as well as other groups on the margins of settled society, could also be absorbed into a specific caste (jati), often of uncertain class (varna), or sometimes into a class, mainly Kshatriya for rulers, seldom Brahmins. Tribes such as Nishadas and Chandalas sometimes seem to have amounted to a fifth varna of their own.8
The division of society into castes facilitated the inclusion of new cultures and groups of people who could eventually be filed away in the open shelving of the caste system, “slotted into the caste hierarchy, their position being dependent on their occupation and social origins, and on the reason for the induction.” 9 This was an effective way to harness the energies and loyalties of skilled indigenous people who were conquered, subordinated, or encroached upon by a society that already observed class distinctions. For while the system of classes (varnas) was already a theoretical mechanism for assimilation,10 the system of castes (jatis) now offered the practical reality of a form of integration,11 from outside the system to inside it. Caste thus paved the way for other conversions, such as that of Hindus to Buddhism or Jainism or to the new non-Vedic forms of Hinduism—renunciant or sectarian.
Many of the assimilated castes were Shudras, who were excluded from participating in the Vedic rituals but often had their own rituals and worshiped their own gods.12 Below the Shudras were the so-called polluted castes; beside, rather than below them, were the tribals and unassimilated aliens (mlecchas). The logic of class placed some tribal groups in a castelike category, albeit one standing outside the caste hierarchy; tribals are relegated not to a distinct level within a vertical structure, but rather to a horizontal annex that could not be integrated into any cubbyhole in the system.13 But some tribals are peculiarly intimate outsiders, recognized as neighbors whom the system can ultimately assimilate within the system more easily than alien invaders like Turks or Europeans. The system of castes was rationalized through an ideology of purity and pollution that was applied to the subgroups, both ethnic and professional, within the four classes. As some professions were defined as purer than others, the hierarchy took over.
Like the Buddhists and Jainas, many of the new sects disavowed caste or at least questioned its assumptions.14 At the same time, there was an increasing tendency, which Ashoka did much to popularize, to define a dharma that could be all things to all men, a dharma/dhamma so general (sadharana, “held in common”), so perpetual (sanatana) that it applied to all right-thinking people always, transcending the differences between various sects. And though the Brahmins quickly manipulated the system to keep individuals from moving up in the hierarchy of castes, vertical mobility was possible for the caste as a whole, if the entire group changed its work and, sometimes, its location. In this way, a particular caste might begin as a Shudra caste and eventually become a Brahmin caste. Some of the assimilated castes did become Brahmins, Kshatriyas, or Vaishyas and thus had access to the rites of the twice born. So many kings were of Shudra or Brahmin origin rather than Kshatriyas that by the time the Muslim rulers reached India they found it difficult to make a correct identification of either a class or a caste among their opposite numbers.15
The Mahabharata both challenges and justifies the entire class structure. The word for “class” (varna) here begins to draw upon its other meaning of “color.” In the course of one of the long discussions of dharma, one sage says to another: “Brahmins are fair [white], Kshatriyas ruddy [red], Vaishyas sallow [yellow], and Shudras dark [black].” The adjectives can denote either skin color or the four primary colors that are symbolically associated with the four classes,16 as well as with the three qualities of matter plus yellow (saffron? ocher?) for the transcendent fourth of spirit. In one passage, someone asks a sage a series of questions that show us something of the perceived need, at this time, newly to justify the (mis)treatment of the lower classes:
THE ORIGIN OF CLASS COLORS
“If different colors distinguish different classes among the four classes, how is it that there is a mixture of colors in all classes? Desire, anger, fear, greed, sorrow, worry, hunger, and exhaustion affect all of us. How then are the classes distinguished? Sweat, urine, feces, phlegm, mucus, and blood flow out of all our bodies. How then are the classes distinguished? And how can you tell one class from another among all the species [ jati] of the countless creatures, moving and still, that have such various colors?” The sage replied: “Actually, there is no difference between the classes; this whole universe is made of brahman. But when the creator emitted it long ago, actions/karmas divided it into classes. Those Brahmins who were fond of enjoying pleasures, quick to anger and impetuous in their affections, abandoned their own dharma and became Kshatriyas, with red bodies. Those who took up herding cattle and engaged in plowing, and did not follow their own dharma, became yellow Vaishyas. And those who were greedy and fond of violence (himsa) and lies, living on all sorts of activities, fallen from purity, became black Shudras. And that’s how these actions/karmas split off the Brahmins into a different class, for there was never any interruption of their dharma and their sacrificial rituals (12.181.5-14).
The implication is that in the beginning, everyone had not only the same general physical makeup (the Shylock argument: Cut us and we bleed) and the same general dharma of good behavior, but the same sva-dharma, “one’s own-dharma,” the particular dharma of each class (and, later, each caste), and that that primeval sva-dharma was the sva-dharma of Brahmins: maintaining dharma and sacrificial rituals. But then each of the other classes voluntarily took up other activities—the Kshatriyas indulged in pleasure and anger (a contradiction of the earlier statement that we all share these emotions), the Vaishyas in commerce, and the Shudras in violent and unclean professions—leaving the Brahmins alone in possession of the original dharma that had been meant for everyone, that had been intended as, in effect, the common (sadharana) dharma.
Krishna’s declaration to Arjuna in the Gita that “it is better to do your own duty poorly than another’s well” (echoed in Manu [10.97]) ignored the fact that Arjuna’s own duty as a warrior would forever doom him to relative inferiority vis-à-vis Brahmins whosesva-dharma just happened to conform with the universal dharma that dictated nonviolence. Here is the catch-22 that Manu perpetuates: the hierarchically superior prototype is also the generalizable archetype. Although, in reality, power was largely in the hands of the rulers, the Brahmin imaginary relegated the violent ruler to a place inferior to that of the nonviolent prototype, the Brahmin.
The conversation about the colors thus brings the argument for equality into the open—where it must have been at this time, when various social barriers were being challenged—but the old argument from creation comes to the rescue, and the class differences are affirmed in new ways. Now the class system is not created ab initio, by the gods, as in the Vedic “Poem of the Primeval Man”; now it results from the bad karmic choices of the classes themselves. It’s their own damn fault. This is a major transition from authoritative decree to apologia.
THE NISHADAS
The four classes were the central concern of a broader social agenda that included (by excluding) both Pariahs (even lower than the Shudras) and tribal people, epitomized by the Nishadas. A typically cold-blooded disregard of the Nishadas is evident in a story told early in the Mahabharata:
THE HOUSE OF LAC
When the Pandavas were still young, and living with their mother, Kunti, their enemies tricked them into staying in a highly combustible house made of lac [a kind of natural resin], which they intended to burn. Yudhishthira decided that they should put six people in the house, set fire to it, and escape. Kunti held a feast to which she invited a hungry Nishada woman and her five sons. The Nishadas got drunk and remained after the other guests had left; the Pandavas set fire to the house and escaped, and when the townspeople found the charred remains of the innocent Nishada woman and her five sons, they assumed that the Pandavas were dead (1.134-37).
Only the single word “innocent” (“without wrongdoing” [1.137.7]) suggests the slightest sympathy for the murdered Nishadas. They are sacrificial substitutes, whom the author of this text treats as expendable because he regards them as subhuman beings. Perhaps their drunkenness (one of the four addictive vices of lust) is meant to justify their deaths.
A somewhat more sympathetic story about Nishadas is the tale of Ekalavya:
EKALAVYA CUTS OFF HIS THUMB
Drona was the Pandavas’ archery tutor, and Arjuna was his star pupil. One day a boy named Ekalavya, the son of a tribal Nishada chieftain, came to them. When Drona, who knew dharma, refused to accept the son of a Nishada as a pupil, Ekalavya touched his head to Drona’s feet, went out into the jungle, and made a clay image of Drona, to which he paid the respect due a teacher. He practiced intensely and became a great archer. One day the Pandavas went out hunting with their dog. The dog wandered off, came upon Ekalavya, and stood there barking at him until the Nishada shot seven arrows almost simultaneously into the dog’s mouth. The dog went whimpering back to the Pandavas, who were amazed and went to find the man who had accomplished this feat. They found him and asked him who he was, and he told them he was the Nishada Ekalavya, a pupil of Drona’s.
They went home, but Arjuna kept thinking about Ekalavya, and one day he asked Drona why he had a pupil, the son of a Nishada, who was an even better archer than he, Arjuna. Drona then resolved to do something about this. He took Arjuna with him to see Ekalavya, and when he found him, he said to Ekalavya, “If you are my pupil, pay me my fee right now.” Ekalavya, delighted, said, “Command me, my guru. There is nothing I will not give my guru.” Drona replied, “Give me your right thumb.” When Ekalavya heard this terrible speech from Drona, he kept his promise. His face showed his joy in it, and his mind was entirely resolved to do it. He cut off his thumb and gave it to Drona. And after that, when the Nishada shot an arrow, his fingers were not so quick as before. Arjuna was greatly relieved (1.123.10-39).
This is a brutal story, even for the Mahabharata. How are we to understand it? First of all, who is Ekalavya? He is a prince among his own people, but that wins him no points with the Pandava princes. The Nishadas here embrace Hindu dharma and Hindu forms of worship but are still beneath the contempt of the caste system. For such a person to stand beside the Pandava princes in archery classes was unthinkable; that is what Drona, who “knew dharma,” realized.
In order to protect both dharma and the reputation of his own world-class archery student, Drona claims his retroactive tuition, the guru-dakshina. Of course we are shocked; to add insult to injury, Drona really didn’t teach Ekalavya at all and hardly deserves any tuition fees, let alone such a grotesque payment. But where is the author’s sympathy? It is hard to be sure. It is arrogant of Ekalavya to push in where he does not belong; he cannot be a noble archer, for he was born into the wrong family for nobility. But Ekalavya does not act arrogant. His outward appearance invokes all the conventional tropes for tribals: he is described as black, wrapped in black deerskin, hair all matted, dressed in rags, his body caked with dirt. He is made of the wrong stuff (or, as we would say, has the wrong genes). He is physically dirt. But his inner soul, reflected in his behavior, is pious and respectful; he does what the teacher tells him to do; not only is he a brilliant archer, but he is honest and humble. To this extent, at least, the Mahabharata likes him and presumably pities him; it refers to Drona’s command as “terrible” (daruna).
Yet the act by which Ekalavya proves his mettle as an archer is one of gratuitous and grotesque cruelty to a dog, the animal that is in many ways the animal counterpart, even the totem, of a Nishada. The dog barks at him, betraying the class attitude that dogs often pick up from their masters; the dog doesn’t like the way Ekalavya looks and, probably, smells. Does Ekalavya’s unsympathetic treatment of this dog cancel out our sympathy for Ekalavya as the victim of interhuman violence? Does it justify Drona’s cruel treatment of him—what goes around comes around, travels down the line—or, at least, remind us of the cruelty inherent in the sva-dharma of a hunter? But the text shows no sympathy for the dog and therefore no condemnation of Ekalavya for his treatment of the dog.
Here, as in the tale of Yudhishthira’s dog, the story shows just how rotten the caste system is but does not change it. No dogs get into heaven; Ekalavya loses his thumb. I read the text as deeply conflicted; it assumes that this is the way things must be, but it does not like the way things must be. It paints Ekalavya sympathetically despite itself. If we compare this story with the Ramayana tale of Shambuka, we can see one significant difference: The central episode of mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is no longer framed and balanced by another story (the revival of a child) or by the interloper’s evil goal (usurping the gods’ privileges). The basic point is the same as for Shambuka—don’t get ideas above your station—but here it is starker, unjustified by anything but uppitiness. And where we learned nothing at all about Shambuka but his class, now Ekalavya’s physical repulsiveness is contrasted with his high moral qualities. Is this progress? Perhaps. It shows a more complex view of dharma, though it still upholds that dharma.17
In the face of his defense of the class system, the author of this story saw the humanity in Ekalavya, saw that tribals were human beings of dignity and honor. It doesn’t necessarily mean that tribals tried to break into the professions of Kshatriyas. Nor does it mean that Kshatriyas went around cutting off the thumbs of tribals. It means that the author of this text imagined the situation and was troubled by it. The people who heard and, eventually, read the text must have seen that too; maybe some of them, as a result, treated the tribals whom they encountered with more humanity. The imagination of a better world may have made it a better world.
Moreover, during the long history of both this story and the story of the Nishada woman and her sons, different people did read the story differently; the reading of the Brahmin imaginary was certainly not the only one. This is a moment that justifies a bit of fast-forwarding. There is a Jaina text from the sixteenth century CE that begins much like the Mahabharata story of Ekalavya but then gives the protagonist a different name and a different tribe (a Bhil or Bhilla, even more scorned than a Nishada) and veers in a very different direction:
In Hastinapura, Arjuna learned the entire science of archery from Drona and became as it were another image [murti] of Drona, and honored him with many gems, pearls, gold, elephants, horses, and so forth. The guru said to him, “Arjuna, choose a boon.” Arjuna replied, “Sir, if you are satisfied with me, let there be no one but me who knows such a science of archery.” Thinking, “The words of great gurus can never fail to come true,” Drona agreed. One day, a certain Bhil named Bhimala, living on the banks of the Ganges, came and asked Drona to be his guru; obtaining his promise, he went back to his own place and made an image of Drona out of mud, and honored it with flowers and sandalwood and so forth, and said, “Drona, give me the knowledge of archery,” and practiced the science of archery in front of him. And with his mind and heart full of the emotion of passionate devotion to him [bhakti], the Bhil after a certain time became like a second Arjuna.
One day, Arjuna, following Drona, who had gone in front to take a bath in the Ganges, saw that the mouth of his own dog was filled with arrows that had not pierced his upper lip, lower lip, palate, tongue, or teeth. Thinking, “No one but me has such a power,” he was amazed, and going forward by following along the arrows from his dog’s mouth, he saw Bhimala and asked him, “Who shot these arrows into the dog’s mouth?” “I did.” “Who is your guru?” The Bhil said, “Drona is my guru.” Hearing that, Arjuna reported this to Drona and then said, “Hey, master. If people like you leap over the boundary markers of words, then what can we wretched creatures do?”
Drona went there and asked the Bhil, “Where is your guru?” and the Bhil showed him the representation that he himself had made and told him what he had done, saying, “Arjuna! This is the fruit of my bhakti.” But the sneaky, cheating Arjuna said to him, “Bhil, with your great zeal, you must do puja with the thumb of your right hand for this Drona whom you met through us.” The Bhil said, “Yes,” and did it. But then the guru said, “Arjuna! You are a sneaky urban crook, and you have deceived this artless, honest, unsophisticated forest dweller. But by my favor, even without a thumb these people will be able to shoot arrows.” And as he said this, the guru gave the Bhil this favor and went back to his own place. And so, even today, a Bhil can shoot arrows using his middle finger and his forefinger.18
The entire moral weight has shifted; now it is Arjuna, not Drona, who makes the cruel demand, and Drona who objects to it and who calls Arjuna deceitful and cunning, in contrast with the artless, honest Bhil, who does not hurt the dog, as the text takes pains to tell us. Indeed Drona has agreed to be the Bhil’s guru at the start and, at the end, grants him superior skill in archery, despite Arjuna’s attempts to hobble him. The image of Drona that the Bhil makes of mud is now matched by other flesh and blood images: Arjuna is the image of Drona, and the Bhil is the image of Arjuna, hence of Drona, once removed. Altogether, the Bhil, with his grotesque guru gift (no longer a Vedic tuition gift, but a Hindu puja), comes off smelling like a rose, and Arjuna, with his gift of gold and precious jewels and horses and elephants, does not.
The forefinger is called the tarjaniya, the finger that points, that accuses, and here it points straight at Arjuna. Knowing all this, we can see other possible multiple readings of the story even in the Mahabharata. For there is a two-way conversation going on between the Hindu and Jaina texts, an intertextual conversation. The Jaina text quotes the Hindu Mahabharata, an example of the widespread intertextuality between religions in India, not just within Hinduism. But Hindus would probably know the Jaina version too, a supposition justifiable on the basis of our understanding of the relationship between Hindus and Jainas at this period, and this may have contributed to the eventual use of the story of Ekalavya by contemporary Hindu Pariahs, for whom he is an important hero.
Whatever the spirit in which the tale of Ekalavya was originally told, it continued to be remembered among people crying out for social reform. A glance at later versions of the same story supports some of the hypothetical meanings that I have hunted out of the original telling and suggests, but certainly does not prove, that the seed of that later response may already have been there in the Sanskrit text (hindsight alert!), or at least that there may have been other readings of this episode besides the original one we have, with other evidence of moral conscience, to bridge the gap between the first recorded telling and later versions that explicitly call out for justice.
Whether the situation was equally encouraging for women is a subject that we must now consider.
WOMEN
The women of the Mahabharata are extraordinarily prominent, feisty, and individualistic, in part as a result of changes that were taking place in the social structures at the time of the recension of the text (such as the widespread public recognition of women as donors and renouncers, and their more active role in the pujas of sectarian Hinduism), in part as a result of the infusion of the Sanskrit corpus with stories from village and rural traditions that were less hide-bound in their attitudes to women. The new attention paid to women in the Mahabharata emerges clearly from the stories of the births of both its legendary author, Vyasa, and its heroes:
THE BIRTH OF VYASA
Once a fisherman caught a fish, found a baby girl in its belly, and raised her as his daughter. A powerful Brahmin sage seduced the fisherman’s daughter, Satyavati, as she ferried him across the river. She gave birth to her first son, Vyasa, on an island in the river and abandoned him (he had instantly grown to manhood). The sage restored her virginity (and removed her fishy smell) (1.57.32-75).
Vyasa is of mixed lineage, not merely Brahmin and Kshatriya (for though Satyavati’s mother was a fish, her father was a king; it’s a long story) but human and animal (for his grandparents were a Kshatriya, a female fish, and, presumably, a Brahmin man and woman). This double miscegenation will be repeated several times, always with variations, in this lineage.
The birth of Vyasa’s natural sons (Satyavati’s grandsons) is more complex and correspondingly more subtly problematic:
THE BIRTH OF VYASA’S CHILDREN
Satyavati later married King Shantanu and gave birth to another son, who became king but died childless, leaving two widows, the Kshatriya princesses Ambika and Ambalika. Satyavati, who did not want the lineage to end, summoned Vyasa to go to the beds of the two widows in order to father children with his half brother’s widows. Vyasa was ugly and foul-smelling; his beard was red, his hair orange. Since Ambika closed her eyes when she conceived her son, Dhritarashtra, Vyasa cursed him to be born blind. Ambalika turned pale and conceived Pandu the Pale. When Vyasa was sent to Ambika a second time, she sent in her place a slave girl [dasi]. The girl gave Vyasa great pleasure in bed, and he spent the whole night with her; she gave birth to a healthy son, Vidura, but since his mother was not a Kshatriya, he could not be king (1.99-100).
Though Hindu law allows the levirate (niyoga), the law by which a brother begets children on behalf of his dead or impotent brother (the Artha-shastra [3.4.27-41] says any male in the family can do it), it is often, as here, disastrous.19 Vyasa appears in theMahabharata as a kind of walking semen bank, the author both of the story of the Pandavas and of the Pandavas themselves (just as Valmiki not only invents the poetic form of the Ramayana, the shloka, but tells the story and raises, though he does not beget, the poets). The widows reject him because he is old and ugly and smells fishy, a characteristic that he apparently took from his mother when she lost it. He is also the wrong color, and this, plus the mother’s temporary pallor, results in the birth of a child, Pandu, who is the wrong color—perhaps an albino, perhaps sickly, perhaps a euphemism for his future impotence.20 Dhritarashtra’s mother-to-be closes her eyes (and, presumably, thinks of Hastinapur), and so her son is blind. A slave girl who functions as a dispensable, low-class stand-in (like the Nishadas burned in the house of lac) gives birth to Vidura, the incarnation of Dharma in fulfillment of Mandavya’s curse that he should be born as the son of a Shudra woman. Where Rama and his brothers have different mothers and different wives but share both a single human father and a single divine father, the five Pandavas have one mother (and one wife) and one human father but different divine fathers.
In this disastrous levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, for great-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins, and five Kshatriyas, while the third has a Kshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins, and four slaves. Are you still with me?). In fact the arrangement was originally more symmetrical, for there had been a third woman, Amba,fv who had been carried off by Bhishma, yet another son of Satyavati’s husband Shantanu (it’s another long storyfw); but she departs before Vyasa arrives on the scene, and she eventually dies in a complex transsexual act of revenge against Bhishma (yet another long story).21 Ambika’s and Ambalika’s hatred of their surrogate lover, though much milder than Amba’s hatred of Bhishma, results not in their deaths or his but in a confusion over the throne, because the women’s recoiling from Vyasa results in physical disabilities in their children that disqualify them from the kingship: blindness, pallor, and low class. This confusion leads to war and ultimately to the destruction of almost all the descendants of Pandu and Dhritarashtra.
The Mahabharata goes on to tell us how in the next generation, Pandu was cursed to die if he ever made love with any of his wives, for having mistaken a mating man for a mating stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). Fortunately, Pandu’s wife, Kunti, had a mantra that allowed her to invoke gods as proxy fathers of Pandu’s sons: Dharma (who fathered Yudhishthirafx), the Wind (father of Bhima), and Indra (father of Arjuna) (1.90, 1.101). Kunti then generously lent her mantra to Madri, Pandu’s second wife, who invoked the Ashvins to father the twins Nakula and Sahadeva. Years later Pandu seduced Madri one day when he was overcome by desire for her; he died, in fulfillment of the stag’s curse and in imitation of the stag’s death: a fatal coitus interruptus, the sweet death transformed into a bitter death.
But Kunti had already had one son, secretly, out of wedlock. When she was still a young girl, she had decided to try out her mantra, just fooling around. The sun god, Surya, took her seriously; despite her vigorous protests and entreaties, he raped her and afterward restored her virginity. She gave birth to Karna, whom she abandoned in shame; a Charioteer and his wife adopted him and raised him as their own (1.104; 3.290-94; 5.144.1-9). Karna is in many ways the inverse of Vidura: Where Vidura is an incarnate god, raised royally, and has both a surrogate father (Vyasa) and a surrogate mother (the maid in place of Ambika), Karna is of royal birth, raised as a servant, and has a divine father (Surya), a royal mother (Kunti), and two low-class surrogate parents (the Charioteers).
Beneath the sterile or impotent fathers lie angry women. The lineage of the heroes is a series of seductions and rapes: of Satyavati, Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Kunti, and Madri. For Satyavati and Kunti, the seducer or rapist restores the woman’s virginity afterward, and the resulting children are abandoned, as if to erase the entire incident or at least to exculpate the women.
POLYANDRY
Other events in the lives of these women suggest their unprecedented and, alas, never again duplicated freedom.
Polyandry (multiple husbands) is rampant in the Mahabharata, and the text offers us, in four consecutive generations, positive images of women who had several sexual partners (sometimes premarital). Satyavati has two sexual partners (her legitimate husband, Shantanu, and the sage who fathers Vyasa on the island). Ambika and Ambalika have two legitimate partners (the king who dies and Vyasa, through the levirate). Kunti has one husband (Pandu, legitimate but unconsummated) and four sexual partners (gods, quasilegitimate). Madri has three partners (Pandu, legitimate and fatally consummated, and two quasilegitimate gods). Another Mahabharata queen, named Madhavi, sells herself to four kings in succession, for several hundred horses each time, and restores her own virginity after each encounter (5.113-17). But the prize goes to Draupadi, who has five legitimate husbands, the five Pandavas. Her polyandrous pentad is truly extraordinary, for though polygyny (multiple wives) was the rule, and men could have several spouses throughout most of Hindu history (as, indeed, each of the Pandavas, except Yudhishthira, had at least one wife in addition to Draupadi; Arjuna had three more), women most decidedly could not. Since there is no other evidence that women at this time actually had multiple husbands, these stories can only be suggestive, if not incontrovertible, evidence either of women’s greater sexual freedom or, perhaps, of men’s fears of what might happen were women to have that freedom. Draupadi’s hypersexuality may simply have validated an ideal that was understood to be out of reach for ordinary women, imagined precisely in order to be disqualified as a viable option. What else, then, can these stories mean?
Hindus at this period were apparently troubled by Draupadi’s polyandry, for which the Mahabharata gives two different excuses (always a cause for suspicion). First, it says that Arjuna won Draupadi in a contest and brought her home to present her to his mother; as he and his brothers approached the house, they called out, “Look what we got!” and she, not looking up, said, as any good mother would say, “Share it together among you all (1.182).” And so all five brothers married Draupadi. Not content with this rather farfetched explanation, the Mahabharata tries again: Vyasa says that all five Pandavas are really incarnations of Indra (which does not contradict the statement that only Arjuna was the son of Indra, since as we have seen, these are two different processes: Dharma becomes incarnate in Vidura and fathers Yudhishthira), and Draupadi the incarnation of Shri (the goddess of prosperity, the wife of Indra and of all kings).fy Still not satisfied, Vyasa offers a third explanation:
DRAUPADI’S FIVE HUSBANDS
The daughter of a great sage longed in vain for a husband; she pleased the god Shiva, who offered her a boon, and she asked for a virtuous husband. But she asked again and again, five times, and so Shiva said, “You will have five virtuous husbands.” And that is why she married the five Pandavas. She objected, saying that it is against the law for a woman to have more than one husband, for then there would be promiscuity; moreover, her one husband should have her as a virgin. But Shiva reassured her that a woman is purified every month with her menses and therefore there would be no lapse from dharma in her case, since she had asked repeatedly for a husband. Then she asked him if she could be a virgin again for each act of sexual union, and he granted this too (1.189; 1.1.157).
Like other polyandrous women whose virginities were restored, sometimes after premarital seduction or rape, Draupadi will be restored to purity each month after willing conjugal sex. In this case there is no need to justify or purify her, but there is a perceived need, if she has a different husband each month, to avoid promiscuity—samkara (“con-fusion” or “mixing”), the same word that is used for the reprehensible mixture of classes.
The mythological extemporizings were not sufficient to protect Draupadi from frequent slurs against her chastity. When Duryodhana has Draupadi dragged into the assembly hall, much as Rama summons Sita to the public assembly, and Duhshasana attempts to strip her, despite the fact that she is wearing a garment soiled with her menstrual blood (the same blood that was supposed to purify her), the enemies of the Pandavas justify their insults to her by arguing that a woman who sleeps with five men must be a slut (2.61.34-36). Yet all her children are legitimate; they are called the Draupadeyas (“Children of Draupadi”) by a matronymic, which may be nothing more than a way of getting around the awkward fact that though she is said to have one son from each husband, people often lose track of which Pandava fathered which son. So too the multiply fathered sons of Kunti are often called Kaunteyas (“Children of Kunti”) although they are also called Pandavas, since they have a single legitimate, if not natural, father, Pandu.
The later tradition was not satisfied by any of the official excuses; various retellings in Sanskrit and in vernacular languages during the ensuing, less liberal centuries mocked Draupadi. In one twelfth-century CE text, the evil spirit of the Kali Age incarnate suggests to five gods that are in love with one woman, “Let the five of us enjoy her, sharing her among us, as the five Pandavas did Draupadi.”22 Even the permissive Kama-sutra quotes a scholar (or pedant) who said that any married woman who is known to have had five men is “available” (i.e., can be seduced without moral qualms). For “five men or more” (panchajana ) is an expression for a crowd, a group of people, as in the panchayat, the quorum of a village (KS 1.5.30-31). The thirteenth-century CE commentator unpacks the implications: “If, besides her own husband, a woman has five men as husbands, she is a loose woman and fair game for any man who has a good reason to take her. Draupadi, however, who had Yudhishthira and the others as her own husbands, was not fair game for other men. How could one woman have several husbands? Ask the authors of the Mahabharata!”
Yet the power of Draupadi’s own dharma, her unwavering devotion to her husband(s), is what protects her when Duhshasana tries to strip her; every time he pulls off a her sari, another appears to cover her nakedness, until there is a great heap of silk beside her, and Duhshasana gives up; the implication is that her chastity protects her (2.61.40-45).fz The text often reminds us that Draupadi is no mere mortal but a creature from another world; there is a prediction that Draupadi will lead the Kshatriyas to their destruction, fulfilling the gods’ intention (1.155). How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Draupadi, instead of Sita, been their official role model! Many Hindus name their daughters Sita, but few name them Draupadi.
It is always possible that the Mahabharata was recording a time when polyandry was the custom (as it is nowadays in parts of the Himalayas), but there is no evidence to support this contention. Indeed Pandu tells Kunti another story explicitly remarking upon an archaic promiscuity that is no longer in effect, pointedly reminding her, and any women who may have heard (or read) the text, that female promiscuity was an ancient option no longer available to them:
THE END OF FEMALE PROMISCUITY
The great sage Shvetaketu was a hermit, people say. Once, they say, right before the eyes of Shvetaketu and his father, a Brahmin grasped Shvetaketu’s mother by the hand and said, “Let’s go!” The sage’s son became enraged and could not bear to see his mother being taken away by force like that. But when his father saw that Shvetaketu was angry he said, “Do not be angry, my little son. This is the eternal dharma. The women of all classes on earth are not fenced in; all creatures behave just like cows, my little son, each in its own class.” The sage’s son could not tolerate that dharma and made this moral boundary for men and women on earth, for humans, but not for other creatures. And from then on, we hear, this moral boundary has stood: A woman who is unfaithful to her husband commits a mortal sin that brings great misery, an evil equal to killing an embryo, and a man who seduces another man’s wife, when she is a woman who keeps her vow to her husband and is thus a virgin obeying a vow of chastity, that man too commits a mortal sin on earth (1.113.9-20).
What begins as a rape somehow concludes with a law against willing female adultery, as uncontrollable male sexuality is projected onto the control of allegedly oversexed women. Pandu tells this story to Kunti in order to convince her that it is legal for her to give him children by sleeping with an appointed Brahmin,ga an emergency plan that prompts her then to tell him about the mantra by which she can summon the gods to father her children; he is thus carefully distinguishing the permitted Brahmin from the loose cannon Brahmin in the Shvetaketu story. We recognize Shvetaketu as a hero of the Upanishads, the boy whose father teaches him the doctrine of the two paths; here his father defends promiscuity, using cows as paradigms not, as is usual, of motherly purity, but of bovine license, as cows, of all people, here become the exemplars of primeval female promiscuity. (Perhaps because they are so pure that nothing they do is wrong?)
The Mahabharata keeps insisting that all this is hearsay, as if to make us doubt it; it invokes a vivid, quasi-Freudian primal scene to explain a kind of sexual revulsion. A Brahmin’s right to demand the sexual services of any woman he fancied23 evoked violent protest in ancient Indian texts,gband Draupadi herself is subjected to such sexual harassment (unconsummated) on one occasion when she is in disguise as a servant and not recognized as the princess Draupadi (4.21.1-67). We may read the story of Shvetaketu in part as an anti-Brahmin (and anticow purity) tract, depicting, as it does, a Brahmin as sexually out of control, and cows as naturally promiscuous animals, as well as an explicit rejection of archaic polyandry. The Kama-sutra (1.1.9) names Shvetaketu as one of its original redactors, and the commentary on that passage cites this Mahabharata story to explain how a chaste sage became simultaneously an enemy of male adultery and an authority on sex.
The persistent polyandry in the lineage of the heroines is therefore, I think, a remarkably positive fantasy of female equality, which is to say, a major resistance to patriarchy, and the Mahabharata women—Satyavati, Kunti, and Draupadi—are a feminist’s dream (or a sexist’s nightmare): smart, aggressive, steadfast, eloquent, tough as nails, and resilient. Draupadi, in particular, is unrelenting in her drive to help her husbands regain their kingdom and avenge their wrongs.
Other women in the Mahabharata show remarkable courage and intelligence too, but their courage is often used in subservience to their husbands. The wives of the two patriarchs, Pandu and the blind Dhritarashtra, are paradigms of such courage. Gandhari, the wife of Dhritarashtra, kept her eyes entirely blindfolded from the day of her marriage to him, in order to share his blindness. Pandu’s widows vied for the privilege of dying on his pyre. When he died, Madri mounted his funeral pyre, for, she insisted, “My desire has not been satisfied, and he too was cheated of his desire as he was lying with me, so I will not cut him off from his desire in the house of death (1.116.26).” This is a most unusual justification for suttee, Madri’s intention being not merely to join her husband in heaven (as other suttees will state as their motivation) but to complete the sexual act in heaven. Yet Kunti too wishes to die on Pandu’s pyre, without the peculiar justification of coitus interruptus, but simply because she is the first wife. One of them must remain alive to care for both their children; Madri gets her way and mounts the pyre.gc Kunti and Gandhari later die alongside Dhritrarashtra in a forest fire from which they make no attempt to escape (15.37). The four wives of Vasudeva (the father of Krishna) immolate themselves on Vasudeva’s pyre and join him in heaven; they all were permitted to die because by this time all their children were dead (16.8.16-24).
The association of women with fire is worthy of note. Draupadi, who does not die on her husbands’ funeral pyres (because [1] she dies before them and [2] they don’t have funeral pyres; they walk up into heaven at the end of the story), begins rather than ends her life in fire; she is born out of her father’s fire altar:
THE BIRTH OF DRAUPADI
Drupada performed a sacrifice in order to get a son who would kill his enemy, Drona. As the oblation was prepared, the priest summoned the queen to receive the oblation and let the king impregnate her, but she took so long to put on her perfume for the occasion that the priest made the oblation directly into the fire, and so the son was born out of the fire, not out of the queen. And after the son came a daughter, Draupadi. A disembodied voice said, “This superb woman will be the death of the Kshatriyas.” They called her the Dark Woman (Krishna), because she was dark-skinned (1.155.1-51).
Draupadi, born of fire, is significantly motherless, like Sita, who was born of Earth and returns into the earth, after she has entered fire and come out of it. Like Sita, Draupadi is an elemental goddess who is often called ayonija (“born from no womb”)24 and follows her husband(s) to the forest. In Draupadi’s case, the absence of the expected mother is balanced by the unexpected presence of the daughter. Unasked for, riding into life on the coattails of her brother, Draupadi went on to become the heart and soul of the Pandavas. She also went on, in India, to become a goddess with a sect of her own, worshiped throughout South India primarily by lower castes, Pariahs, and Muslims.25 The Mahabharata mentions other dark goddesses who may well already have had such sects: the seven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful, especially for children,26 and the great goddess Kali (Maha-Kali).27 Indeed Draupadi is closely connected with the dark goddess Kali.28 As in the stories of the births of Pandu and Draupadi, as well as the origins of class colors, skin color here has a religious significance but no social meaning, positive or negative.
A partial explanation for the Mahabharata’s open-minded attitude toward polyandrous women may come from a consideration of the historical context. The text took shape during the Mauryan and immediate post-Mauryan period, a cosmopolitan era that encouraged the loosening of constraints on women in both court and village. The women of the royal family were often generous donors to the Buddhist community,29 and women from all classes, including courtesans, became Buddhists.30 The king used women archers for his bodyguards in the palace, and Greek women (Yavanis) used to carry the king’s bows and arrows on hunts. Women served as spies. Female ascetics moved around freely. Prostitutes paid taxes. The state provided supervised work, such as spinning yarn, for upper-class women who had become impoverished, widowed, or deserted and for aging prostitutes.gd If a slave woman gave birth to her master’s child, both she and the child were immediately released from slavery.31 Thus women were major players in both Buddhism and Hinduism during this period, and the Mahabharata may reflect this greater autonomy. Indeed the tales of polyandry may reflect the male redactors’ nightmare vision of where all that autonomy might lead.
THE WORLDS OF THE TWO GREAT POEMS
Indian tradition generally puts the two poems in two different categories: The Ramayana is the first poem (kavya), and the Mahabharata is a history (itihasa) or a dharma text.ge The Ramayana prides itself on its more ornate language, and its central plot occupies most of the text, while theMahabharata reflects the traces of straightforward oral composition and indulges in a great many secondary discussions or narrations only loosely linked to the main plot. The Mahabharata at the very end sketches an illusory scene of hell that is an emergency balloon to float it out of a corner it had painted itself into. But the Ramayana is about illusion from the very start.
The Ramayana tells of a war against foreigners and people of another species, with clear demarcations of forces of good triumphing over evil; the Mahabharata is about a bitter civil war with no winners. The Ramayana doesn’t usually problematize dharma; theMahabharata does, constantly. Where the Ramayana is triumphalist, the Mahabharata is tragic. Where the Ramayana is affirmative, the Mahabharata is interrogative.32 Rama is said to be the perfect man, and his flaws are largely papered over, while the flaws ofMahabharata heroes are what the whole thing is about. When Rama’s brother Bharata is given the throne that should have been Rama’s, each of the brothers, like Alphonse and Gaston in the old story, modestly and generously tries to give the kingdom to the other (R 2.98). In the Mahabharata, by contrast, when the succession is in question, the sons of the two royal brothers fight tooth and nail over it. Where the Ramayana sets the time of Rama’s idyllic rule, the “Ram-Raj,” in an idealized, peaceful Mauryan Empire of the future, the Mahabharata jumps back in time over the Mauryan Empire to an archaic time of total, no-holds-barred war.
But we cannot say that the Ramayana came first, when people still believed in dharma, and then the Mahabharata came along and deconstructed it. Nor can we say that the Mahabharata first looked the disaster square in the eyes and showed what a mess it was, and then after that theRamayana flinched and cleaned it up, like a gentrified slum or a Potemkin village. Both views exist simultaneously and in conversation: The Ramayana says, “There is a perfect man, and his name is Rama,” and the Mahabharata says, “Not really; dharma is so subtle that even Yudhishthira cannot always fulfill it.” Or, if you prefer, the Mahabharata says, “Dharma is subtle,” and the Ramayana replies, “Yes, but not so subtle that it cannot be mastered by a perfect man like Rama.”
Each text asks a characteristically different question to prompt the paradigmatic story: The Ramayana begins when Valmiki asks the sage Narada, “Is there any man alive who has all the virtues? (R1.1.1-2),” to which the answer is the triumphal, or more or less triumphal, story of Rama. By contrast, embedded inside the Mahabharata are two requests by Yudhishthira for a story parallel to his own; when Draupadi has been abducted, he asks if any man was ever unluckier, unhappier than he, whereupon he is told the story of Rama and Sita (3.257-75), and when he has gambled away his kingdom and is in exile, he asks the same question, to which the answer is the story of the long-suffering gambler Nala (3.49.33-34). This contrast between triumph and tragedy could stand for the general tone of the two great poems.