CHAPTER 12
CHRONOLOGY
c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks (Yavanas), Scythians (Shakas), Bactrians, and Parthians (Pahlavas) continue to enter India
c. 100 CE “Manu” composes his Dharma-shastra
c. 78-140 CE Kanishka reigns and encourages Buddhism
c. 150 CE Rudradaman publishes the first Sanskrit inscription, at Junagadh
c. 200 CE Kautilya composes the Artha-shastra
c. 300 CE Vatsyayana Mallanaga composes the Kama-sutra
RESTORATIONS FOR KILLING A MONGOOSE
OR AN UNCHASTE WOMAN
If a man kills a cat or a mongoose, a blue jay, a frog, a dog, a lizard,
an owl, or a crow, he should carry out the vow for killing a Shudra.gf
For killing a horse, he should give a garment to a Brahmin; for an
elephant, five black bulls; for a goat or sheep, a draft ox; for a donkey,
a one-year-old calf. To become clean after killing an unchaste woman
of any of the four classes, a man should give a Brahmin a leather bag
(for killing a Brahmin woman), a bow (for a Kshatriya woman), a
billy goat (for a Vaishya woman), or a sheep (for a Shudra woman).
Manu’s Dharma-shastra (11.132, 137, 139), c. 100 CE
This list (lists being the format of choice for the textbooks known as shastras) groups together animals, social classes, and (unchaste) women around the issues of killing and restorations for killing, all central issues for the shastras. In the long period entre deux empires, the formulation of encyclopedic knowledge acknowledged the diversity of opinion on many subjects, while at the same time, some, but not all, of the shastras closed down many of the options for women and the lower castes.1
The Brahmin imaginary has no canon, but if it did, that canon would be the body of shastras, which spelled out the dominant paradigm with regard to women, animals, and castes, the mark at which all subsequent antinomian or resistant strains of Hinduism aimed. The foreign flux, now and at other moments, on the one hand, loosened up and broadened the concept of knowledge, making it more cosmopolitan—more things to eat, to wear, to think about—and at the same time posed a threat that drove the Brahmins to tighten up some aspects of social control.
THE AGE OF DARKNESS, INVASIONS, PARADOX, AND DIVERSITY
Both the diversity encompassed by the shastras and their drive to control that diversity are best understood in the context of the period in which they were composed.2 There were no great dynasties in the early centuries of the Common Era; the Shakas and Kushanas were bluffing when they used the titles of King of Kings and Son of God, on the precedent of the Indo-Greeks. Some Euro-American historians have regarded this period as India’s Dark Age, dark both because it lacked the security of a decently governed empire (the Kushanas very definitely did not Rule the Waves) and because the abundant but hard-to-date sources leave historians with very little available light to work with. Some Indian nationalist historians regarded it as the Age of Invasions, the decadent age of non-Indian dynasties, when barbarians (mlecchas) continued to slip into India. But it looks to us now rather more like a preimperial Age of Diversity, a time of rich cultural integration, a creative chaos that inspired the scholars of the time to bring together all their knowledge, as into a fortified city, to preserve it for whatever posterity there might be. It all boils down to whether you think confusion (samkara) is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Political chaos is scary for the orthodox, creative for the unorthodox; what politics sees as instability appears as dynamism in terms of commercial and cultural development.3 The paradox is that the rule of the “degenerate Kshatriyas” and undistinguished, often non-Indian kings opened up the subcontinent to trade and new ideas.4 The art and literature of this period are far richer than those of either of the two empires that frame it, the Mauryas and the Guptas.5
Buddhist monuments, rather than Hindu, are our main source of the visual record of this period. The gloriously miscellaneous quality of the culture of the time is epitomized in the reliefs on the great Buddhist stupa at Amaravati, in the western Deccan, which depict scenes of everyday life that defy denomination: musicians, dancers, women leaning over balconies, horses cavorting in the street, elephants running amok, bullocks laboring to pull a heavy (but elegant) carriage, ships with sails and oars. In a nice moment of self-referentiality (or infinite regress), there is a scene depicting masons constructing the stupa that depicts a scene of masons constructing the stupa.6 This sort of self-imaging later became a characteristic of Hindu temples, in which the individual pieces of the temple mirror the grand plan of the whole temple.7
There was constant movement, constant trade from Greece, Central Asia, West Asia, the ports of the Red Sea, and Southeast Asia.8 Trade flowed along the mountainous northern routes through Central Asia and by sea to the great ports of South India. A book with the delicious title of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, composed by an unnamed Greek in about 80 CE, gave detailed navigational instructions to those planning to sail to what is now Gujarat and thence to gain access to the Deccan, where one could buy and export such delicacies as ginseng, aromatic oils, myrrh, ivory, agate, carnelian, cotton cloth, silk, Indian muslins, yarn, and long pepper. The Indians, for their part, imported “fine wines (Italian preferred), singing boys, beautiful maidens for the harem, thin clothing of the finest weaves, and the choicest ointments.” As always, horses were imported from abroad but now were also bred in various parts of India.9
In return, Indians traveled to and traded with Southeast Asia and Central Asia,10 exporting Indian culture to the Mekong Delta, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Sinkiang, to Afghanistan and Vietnam, to the Gobi Desert, on the Silk Route. This economic porosity continued well into the fourth century CE, with trade the one thing that was constant.
SECTARIANISM UNDER THE KUSHANAS AND SHATAVAHANAS
The Kushanas, nomadic pastoralists, came down from Central Asia into the Indus plain and then along the Ganges plain to Mathura, beyond Varanasi. Like the Vedic people before them, these horsemen herders were also good cavalry-men 11 and, like them, they may well have come as merchants, allies, or even refugees rather than as conquerors. Their empire (from 78 to 144 CE) culminated in the rule of Kanishka (112 to 144 CE)12 who encouraged a new wave of Buddhist proselytizing. The Fourth Buddhist Council was held under his patronage, and at his capital at Peshawar an enormous stupa was built, nearly a hundred meters in diameter and twice as high. Some coins of his realm were stamped with images of Gautama and the future Buddha Maitreya. He was the patron of the poet Ashvaghosha, who helped organize the Buddhist Council and composed, among other things, the first Sanskrit drama and a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit poetry.
Yet Kanishka also supported other religions.13 The Kushana centers of Gandhara and Mathura in the second century CE produced Hindu images that served as paradigms for regional workshops for centuries to follow.14 A colossal statue of Kanishka has survived, high felt boots and all, though without a head; on the other hand, the Greeks put nothing but heads on their coins.15 This headbody complementarity, familiar to us from the tale of the mixed goddesses, well expresses the delicate balance of political and religious power during this period. Kanishka’s successor issued coins with images of Greek, Zoroastrian, and Bactrian deities, as well as Hindu deities, such as the goddess Uma (Ommo in Bactrian), identified with Parvati, the wife of Shiva, and sometimes depicted together with Shiva. The coins also have images of the goddess Durga riding on her lion and the goddess Shri in a form adapted from a Bactrian goddess.16 Buddhism and Jainism were still vying, peaceably, with Hinduism.
In 150 CE, Rudradaman, a Shaka king who ruled from Ujjain, published a long Sanskrit inscription in Junagadh, in Gujarat; he carved it, in the palimpsest fashion favored by many Indian rulers (temples on stupas, mosques on temples), on a rock that already held a set of Ashoka’s Prakrit Major Rock Edicts. Himself of uncertain class, Rudradaman leaned over backward to praise dharma and pointed out that he had repaired an important Mauryan dam without raising taxes, by paying for it out of his own treasury. He also boasted that he knew grammar, music, the shastras, and logic and was a fine swordsman and boxer, an excellent horseman, charioteer, and elephant rider, and a good poet to boot.17 His is the first substantial inscription in classical Sanskrit (Ashoka and Kanishka had written in various Prakrits, usually Magadhi or Pali). Rudradaman’s choice of Sanskrit, underlined by the fact that he wrote right on top of the Prakrit of Ashoka, may have been designed to establish his legitimacy as a foreign ruler, “to mitigate the lamentable choice of parents,” as the historian D. D. Kosambi suggested.18
The Kushanas gradually weakened, while the Shakas continued to rule until the mid-fifth century CE,19 but both dynasties left plenty of room for others, such as the Pahlavas (Parthians) in Northwest India and the Shatavahanas, whose capital was at Amaravati in the western Deccan, to spring up too. The Shatavahana rulers made various claims: that they were Brahmins who had intermarried with people who were excluded from the system, that they had destroyed the pride of Kshastriyas, and that they had prevented intermarriage among the four classes.20 They were orthodox in their adherence to Vedic sacrifice and Vedic gods, and they made land grants to Brahmins, but they also patronized Buddhism, in part because it was more supportive of economic expansion than Hinduism was: It channeled funds into trade instead of sacrifice and waived the caste taboos on food and trade that made it difficult for pious Hindus to travel. (Buddhists, unlike Hindus, proselytized abroad.) Royal grants to Buddhist monasteries would be seed money, quickly matched by donations from private individuals and guilds; the lists of donors in the cave temple inscriptions include weavers, grain merchants, basket makers, leatherworkers, shipping agents, ivory carvers, smiths, salt merchants, and various craftsmen and dealers, some of them even Yavanas (Greeks or other foreigners).
The Shatavahanas completed building the Great Stupa that Ashoka had begun at Amaravati,21 and mercantile associations living under the Shatavahanas carved out, also in the western Deccan, between about 100 BCE and 170 CE,22 the magnificently sculpted, generally Buddhist caves of Bhaja, Karle, Nasik, and parts of Ajanta and Ellora. Merchants would cluster around the great Buddhist pilgrimage sites, setting up their bazaars and rest houses, shops and stables.23 This later became the model for Hindu pilgrimage sites and temples. There are no remains of stone Hindu temples from this period, though the ones that appeared later seem to be modeled on now-lost wooden temples.
The Hindu response to the Buddhist challenge was not only to reclaim dharma from dhamma and but to extend it. Dharma in the ritual sutras had been mostly about how to do the sacrifice; the dharma-shastras now applied it to the rest of life, dictating what to eat, whom to marry. So too, while karma in the ritual texts usually designated a ritual act, in the dharma-shastras, as in the Mahabharata, it came to be understood more broadly as any morally consequential act binding one to the cycle of death and rebirth. Then there was moksha to deal with, not only (as in the earlier period) in the challenge posed by Buddhism and Jainism, but now, in addition, in the more insidious problem posed by the deconstruction of dharma in the Mahabharata. The challenge facing not just the Brahmins but everyone else trying to ride the new wave was to factor into the systematizing modes of thought that were already in place the new social elements that were questioning the Brahmin norms. These cultural changes, shaking the security of the orthodox in an age of flux, were tricky for the dharma-shastras to map, let alone attempt to control,24 and go a long way to explain the hardening of the shastric lines.25 And so the Brahmins began, once again, to circle their wagons.
SHASTRAS
At the end of the long interregnum, a kind of scholasticism developed that was capable of sorting out all the intervening chaos neatly—or not so neatly. In the first millennium Sanskrit still dominated the literary scene as “the language of the gods,” as it had long claimed to be. But now it also became a cosmopolitan language, patronized by a sophisticated community of literati and royalty. It was no longer used only, or primarily, for sacred texts but also as a vehicle for literary and political expression throughout South Asia and beyond.26 It was now the language of science and art as well as religion and literature, the language, in short, of the shastras.
Shastra means “a text, or a teaching, or a science”; ashva-shastra in general is the science of horses, while the Ashva-shastra is a particular textgg about the science of horses. The word shastra comes from the verb shas, meaning “to teach or to punish,” but it also means “discipline” in the sense of an area of study, such as the discipline of anthropology, thus reflecting both of Michel Foucault’s senses of the word. It is related to the verb shams (“injure”), which is the root of the noun for “cruelty,” and it is probably related to our own “chasten,” “chastise,” and “chastity,” through the Latin castigare. Like dharma, the shastras are simultaneously descriptive and proscriptive.
Like the class and caste system itself, the shastric structures were formulated to accommodate diversity. Yet many Brahmins perceived this same diversity as a threat and therefore set out to hierarchize, to put everything in its proper place, to form, to mold, to repress, to systematize—in a word, to discipline (shas) the chaos that they saw looming before them. They herded all the new ideas, like so many strange animals, into their intellectual corrals, and they branded them according to their places in the scheme of things. Attitudes toward women and the lower classes hardened in the texts formulated in this period, even while those same texts give evidence, almost against the will of their authors, of an increasingly wide range of human options. It was as if the gathering chaos of the cultural environment had produced an equal and opposite reaction in the Brahmin establishment; one can almost hear the cries for “law and order!”
The spirit was totalizing and cosmopolitan, an attempt to bring together in one place, from all points in India and all levels of society, a complete knowledge of the subject in question. Totality was the goal of the encyclopedic range both of the subject covered in each text (everything you ever wanted to know about X) and of the span of subjects: beginning with the Trio—dharma, politics (artha), and pleasure (kama)—and going on to grammar, architecture, medicine, dancing and acting, aesthetics in fine art, music, astronomy and astrology, training horses and training elephants, various aspects of natural science and, in particular, mathematics—everything you can imagine and much that you cannot.
The persistent open-endedness, and even open-mindedness, of many of the shastras can be seen in the ways in which they consider variant opinions and offer escape clauses. Each shastra quotes its predecessors and shows why it is better than they are (the equivalent of the obligatory review of the literature in a Ph.D. dissertation). The dissenting opinions are cited in the course of what Indian logic called the other side (the “former wing,” purva-paksha), the arguments that opponents might raise.gh They are rebutted one by one, until the author finally gives his own opinion, the right opinion. But along the way we get a strong sense of a loyal opposition and the flourishing of a healthy debate. The shastras are therefore above all dialogical or argumentative.
Take medicine, for instance, known in India as the science of long life (Ayurveda ). There are a number of medical texts, of which those of Charaka and Sushruta (probably composed in the first and seventh centuries CE, respectively) are the most famous. The medical texts teach how to care for the mind and body in ways that supplement the advice offered, on this same subject, by the dharma-shastras, the teachings of yoga, the Tantras, and other schools of Hinduism. Surgery was generally neglected by Hindu doctors, for reasons of caste pollution, and taken over by Buddhists; the Hindu shastras on medicine derived much of their knowledge of surgery from Buddhist monasteries.27
A passage from Charaka is typical of the way that all of the shastras strive to be open-minded and inclusive:
SECOND, AND THIRD, MEDICAL OPINIONS
Once upon a time, when all the great sages had assembled, a dispute arose about the cause of diseases. One by one the sages stated what each regarded as the cause of disease: the soul, which collects and enjoys karma and the fruits of karma; the mind, when overwhelmed by energy and darkness [rajas and tamas]; rasa [the fluid essence of digested food]; sound and the other objects of the senses; the six elements of matter [earth, water, fire, wind, space, and mind or soul]; one’s parents; one’s karma; one’s own nature; the creator god, Prajapat; and, finally, time.
Now, as the sages were arguing in this way, one of them said, “Don’t talk like this. It is hard to get to the truth when people take sides. People who utter arguments and counterarguments as if they were established facts never get to the end of their own side, as if they were going round and round on an oil press. Get rid of this collision of opinions and shake off the darkness of factionalism. Eating bad food is a cause of diseases.” But another sage replied, “Sir, physicians have an abundance of different opinions. Not all of them will understand this sort of teaching . . . ” (1.1.15.3-34).
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.
CLASS AND CASTE TAXONOMIES
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 sutras28 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). (TheMahabharata 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:
They are traditionally regarded as Dasyus [aliens or slaves], whether they speak barbarian languages or Aryan languages, and they should make their living by their karmas, which the twice-born revile: for Charioteers, the management of horses and chariots; for the Nishadas, killing fish. These castes should live near mounds, trees, and cremation grounds, in mountains and in groves, recognizable and making a living by their own karmas [10.45-50].
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:
The dwellings of Chandalas and Dog cookers [Shva-pakas] should be outside the village; they must use discarded bowls, and dogs and donkeys should be their wealth. Their clothing should be the clothes of the dead, and their food should be in broken dishes; their ornaments should be made of black iron, and they should wander constantly. A man who carries out his duties should not seek contact with them; they should do business with one another and marry with those who are like them. Their food, dependent upon others, should be given to them in a broken dish, and they should not walk about in villages and cities at night. They may move about by day to do their work, recognizable by distinctive marks in accordance with the king’s decrees; and they should carry out the corpses of people who have no relatives; this is a fixed rule. By the king’s command, they should execute those condemned to death, and they should take for themselves the clothing, beds and ornaments of those condemned to death (10.51-56).
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
ANIMALS
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.
WHY YOU MAY, AND MAY NOT, EAT MEAT
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).
In one verse, Manu seems actually to punish a person for not eating meat at the proper time: “But when a man who is properly engaged in a ritual does not eat meat, after his death he will become a sacrificial animal during twenty-one rebirths (5.35).” Thus he encourages people to eat meat—if they follow the rules. Elsewhere he describes meat eating too as an addiction that some people cannot give up entirely: “If he has an addiction [to meat], let him make a sacrificial animal out of clarified butter or let him make a sacrificial animal out of flour; but he should never wish to kill a sacrificial animal for no [religious] purpose (5.37).” Clearly Manu has sympathy for the vegetarian with his veggie cutlets, but also for the addicted carnivore.
At first Manu reflects the Vedic view of limited retribution in the Other World: “A twice-born person who knows the rules should not eat meat against the rules, even in extremity; for if he eats meat against the rules, after his death he will be helplessly eaten by those that he ate. ‘He whose meatin this world do I eat/will in the other world me eat.’ Wise men say that this is why meat is called meat (5.33.55).” But then Manu switches to the post-Vedic view of transmigration, rather than an Other World, and to vegetarianism with a vengeance:
As many hairs as there are on the body of the sacrificial animal that he kills for no [religious] purpose here on earth, so many times will he, after his death, suffer a violent death in birth after birth. You can never get meat without violence to creatures with the breath of life, and the killing of creatures with the breath of life does not get you to heaven; therefore you should not eat meat. Anyone who looks carefully at the source of meat, and at the tying up and slaughter of embodied creatures, should turn back from eating any meat (5.38.48-53).
The last line alone expresses actual sympathy for the suffering of the slaughtered animals.
Manu flees from the horns of his dilemma (on one horn, sacrifice; on the other, vegetarianism) to several lists of animals and classes of animals that you can or, on the other hand, cannot eat, lists that rival in unfathomable taxonomic principles not only Deuteronomy but Ashoka’s edicts; clearly, you can eat a great number of animals, if you know your way around the rules (5.5-25). The authors of shastras make many different lists involving animals: classes of beings one should and should not eat; situations in which lawsuits arise between humans and livestock; punishments for people who injure, steal, or kill various animals; animals (including humans) that Brahmins should not sell; and vows of restoration for anyone who has, advertently or inadvertently, injured, stolen, killed, or eaten (or eaten the excrement of) various animals.35 The passage with which this chapter began, “Restorations for Killing a Mongoose or an Unchaste Woman,” spells out one subset of this enormous group, as some animals are given (presumably to be killed) in restoration for killing other animals or for killing unchaste, hence subhuman, women.
But in addition to the specific times when it is OK to eat meat—for a sacrifice, when it has been properly consecrated, when you would otherwise starve to death (10.105-08), etc.—Manu expresses a general philosophy of carnivorousness:
The Lord of Creatures fashioned all this universe to feed the breath of life, and everything moving and stationary is the food of the breath of life. Those that do not move are food for those that move, and those that have no fangs are food for those with fangs; those that have no hands are food for those with hands; and cowards are the food of the brave. The eater who eats creatures with the breath of life who are to be eaten does nothing bad, even if he does it day after day; for the creator himself created creatures with the breath of life, some to be eaten and some to be eaters (5.28-30).
Recall the similar verse in the Mahabharata: “The mongoose eats mice, just as the cat eats the mongoose; the dog devours the cat, your majesty, and wild beasts eat the dog (12.15.21).” Manu’s terror of piscine anarchy—“fish eat fish”—is a direct extension of Vedic assumptions about natural violence. But Manu also says that “Killing in a sacrifice is not killing. . . . The violence [himsa] to those that move and those that do not move which is sanctioned by the Veda—that is known as nonviolence [ahimsa] (5.39, 44).” By defining the sacrifice as nonviolent, Manu made it nonviolent. In this way, he was able to list the Veda and nonviolence together in his final summary of the most important elements of the moral life, the basic principles of general and eternal dharma (12.83-93; 6.91-94; 10.63).
The two views, violent and nonviolent, are juxtaposed in an uneasy tension in the context within which Manu debates most problems, the ritual.36 Manu transforms five of the earlier Vedic sacrifices (animal sacrifices in which violence is assumed) into five Hindu vegetarian sacrifices that avoid violence (3.70-74). He goes on to argue that these five sacrifices themselves are restorations for the evils committed by normal householders in “slaughterhouses” where small creatures are, often inadvertently, killed (an idea that now seems more Jaina than Hindu but in its day was widely shared): “A householder has five slaughterhouses, whose use fetters him: the fireplace, the grindstone, the broom, the mortar and pestle, and the water jar. The great sages devised the five great sacrifices for the householder to do every day to redeem him from all of these [slaughter-houses] successively (3.68-69).” The justifications of violence in both Manu and the Mahabharata lie behind a later text in which the Brahmins tell the king, “Violence is everywhere and therefore, whatever the Jaina renouncers say is blind arrogance. Can anyone keep alive without eating? And how is food to be got without violence? Is there anyone on earth who does not have a tendency toward violence? Your majesty! People live by violence alone. . . . If a person thinks of his good qualities and thinks badly of others—then also he commits violence.”37 It is ironic that in this very text, the “violence” of thinking badly of others—what we would call intolerance—is committed against Jaina renouncers, who are (blindly and arrogantly) accused of “blind arrogance.”
Manu offers far fewer promeat than antimeat verses (three pro and twenty-five anti). Yet he ends firmly on the fence: “There is nothing wrong in eating meat, nor in drinking wine, nor in sexual union, for this is how living beings engage in life, but disengagement yields great fruit (5.56).” The implication is that these activities are permitted under the specified circumstances, but that even then it is better to refrain from them altogether. Manu’s final redaction brings together both a Vedic tradition of sacrifice and violence and a later tradition of vegetarianism and nonviolence. To him goes the credit for synthesizing those traditions and structuring them in such a way as to illuminate his own interpretation of their interrelationship.
This is a dance of the victims and the victimizers. For the same people and animals appear on both sides of the line, and the assertions that certain animals should not be killed and that people who are leprous or blind have no rights are causally related: People who have killed certain animals are reborn as certain animals, but they are also reborn as lepers or blind men. So too not only are there punishments for humans who eat or sell certain animals, but there are also punishments for humans who eat or sell humans, including their sons and themselves, or who sell their wives (which Manu both permits and punishes) or drink the milk of women (5.9, 9.46, 174, 11.60, 62).
Finally, Manu invokes the argument from equivalence: “The man who offers a horse sacrifice every year for a hundred years, and the man who does not eat meat, the two of them reap the same fruit of good deeds (5.54).” That is, to sacrifice (to kill an animal) or not to (kill and) eat an animal is the same thing. And if that fails, Manu invokes the attitude toward substitution that eventually leads to rituals such as “strangling” rice cakes, a clear atavism from an earlier sacrifice of a living creature.38
The Kama-sutra too regards abstention from meat eating as the paradigmatic act of dharma, yet it notes that people do generally eat meat. Elsewhere too it assumes that the reader of the text will eat meat, as when it recommends, after lovemaking, a midnight supper of “some bite-sized snacks: fruit juice, grilled foods, sour rice broth, soups with small pieces of roasted meats, mangoes, dried meat, and citrus fruits with sugar, according to the tastes of the region (2.10.7-8).” But even Vatsyayana draws the line at dog meat. In arguing that one should not do something stupid just because a text (including his own) tells you to do it, he quotes a verse:
Medical science, for example,
recommends cooking even dog meat,
for juice and virility;
but what intelligent person would eat it? (2.9.42)
It seems, however, that he objects to dog meat on aesthetic rather than dogmatic grounds.
THE CONTROL OF ADDICTION
The Brahmins emitted the shastras, as frightened squid emit quantities of ink, to discipline the addiction that could invade the rational faculties, as the barbarians from the north would invade India in the Kali Age. The Kama-sutra shares with both the Artha-shastra and Manu (as well as with other important Indian traditions such as yoga) an emphasis on the need for the control of addiction, though each text has its own reasons for this.
The texts often call the four major addictions the vices of lust, sometimes naming them after the activities themselves—gambling, drinking, fornicating, hunting—and sometimes projecting the guilt and blame from the addict onto the objects of addiction: dice, intoxicants (wine, various forms of liquor, as well as marijuana and opium), women (or sex), and wild animals. The addictions are also called the royal vices, and indeed the typical member of the royal or warrior class is “a drinker of wine to the point of drunkenness, a lover of women, a great hunter—killing for sport,” as well as a gambler and (beyond the four classical vices) a slayer of men and eater of meat.39 That is, it was the king’s job to indulge in what were, sometimes for him and always for people of other classes, deadly vices. Kings were allowed to have the vices that kill the rest of us, but even kings could be killed by an excess of them; the Artha-shastra advises a king to have a secret agent tempt the crown prince with all four vices and another secret agent dissuade him from them (1.1.28-29).gi The Mahabharata (2.61.20) remarks that the four vices are the curse of a king, and indeed all four play a major part in the Mahabharata story: Pandu is doomed by excessive hunting and forbidden sex (book 1); Yudhishthira and Nala are undone by gambling (books 2 and 3); and the entire clan is destroyed by men who break the law against drinking (book 16). The four addictive vices of desire were also associated with violence, in the double sense of releasing pent-up violent impulses and being themselves the violent form of otherwise normal human tendencies (to search for food, take risks, drink, and procreate).
Hunting is the most obscure of the vices to the mind of nonhunting Euro-Americans, but it shares the quality of “just one more”—there are many stories of hunters who kept going even after they knew they should turn back, until they found themselves benighted or in a dangerous place, or both, gj as well as the quality of blindness (as in “blind drunk”) that makes the hunter mistake a human being for an animal, with disastrous consequences. Both Draupadi (MB 3.248) and Sita (R 3.42) are abducted when their men are away, hunting; King Parikshit, obsessed with hunting, impatiently insults a sage who obstructs his hunt, and is cursed to die (MB 1.26-40); and deer appear to King Yudhishthira in a dream, complaining that their numbers are dwindling because of his family’s incessant hunting (MB 3.244).
We have seen the lament of the compulsive gambler, in the Rig Veda, and noted the self-destructive gambling of two great kings in the Mahabharata (Yudhishthira and Nala). The Artha-shastra ranks gambling as the most dangerous vice a king can have, more dangerous than (in descending order) women, drinking, and hunting (8.3.2-6). But gambling, in the form of a game of dice, was an integral part of the ceremony of royal consecration, the metaphor for the disintegrating four Ages, and a central trope for the role of chance in human life. Whereas Einstein remarked that God does not play dice with the universe, Hindu texts state that God—Shiva—does indeed playgk dice.40 The Vedic consecration ritual includes a ritual dice game of multiple symbolic meanings: the four Ages, the risk implicit in the sacrifice itself, the element of chance in getting and keeping power, the royal vice of gambling that must be channeled into political daring, and the king’s hope of “gathering” in all the winning throws of all the other players (as Raikva did). The king is regarded as the maker of the age, and the ceremonial dice game played at his consecration is said, like the gambling of Shiva in Shaiva mythology, to determine what kind of cosmic age will come up next: Golden Age or Kali Age.41
But one particular king, Yudhishthira, happens to be, as an individual rather than someone in the office of king, a compulsive and unsuccessful gambler, gl and his enemies take advantage of this: They send in to play against Yudhishthira a man known to be invincible, almost certainly dishonest, and Yudhishthira gambles away his possessions, then his brothers, himself, and his wife. Only Draupadi’s courage and wit and legal knowledge are able to save them from slavery, and even so, they lose the kingdom and must go into exile for twelve years, and remain disguised for a thirteenth. Thus the human vice of addictive gambling intrudes upon the controlled ritual of gambling.
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-Brahmins42), 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 snaregm 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:
It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth; for that reason, circumspect men do not get careless and wanton among wanton women. It is not just an ignorant man, but even a learned man of the world, too, that a wanton woman can lead astray when he is in the control of lust and anger. No one should sit in a deserted place with his mother, sister, or daughter; for the strong cluster of the sensory powers drags away even a learned man (2.213-15).
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:
If in the overflowing of adolescence he sets his mind on the wives of other men, the king’s agents should turn him off by means of filthy women pretending to be noble women in empty houses at night.44 If he lusts for wine, they should turn him off by a drugged drink [a spiked drink that makes him nauseated]. If he lusts for gambling, they should have players cheat him. If he lusts for hunting, they should have him terrified by men pretending to be robbers blocking his path (1.17.35-38).
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:
The ten vices [vyasanas] that arise from desire all end badly. Hunting, gambling, sleeping by day, malicious gossip, women, drunkenness, music, singing, dancing, and aimless wandering are the ten vices born of desire. Drinking, gambling, women, and hunting, in that order [i.e., with drinking the worst], are the four worst, and, though they are universally addictive, each vice is more serious than the one that follows (7.45-53).
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
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:
When her husband is dead, she may fast as much as she likes, living on auspicious flowers, roots, and fruits, but she should not even mention the name of another man. Many thousands of Brahmins who were chaste from their youth have gone to heaven without begetting offspring to continue the family. A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven just like those chaste men, even if she has no sons. She reaches her husband’s worlds after death, and good people call her a virtuous woman (4.156-66).
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.46In 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.
WOMEN IN THE KAMA-SUTRA
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.
Here we encounter the paradox of women’s voices telling us, through the text, that women had no voices. Vatsyayana takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want (5.5.7-10). But he often expresses points of view clearly favorable to women,47 particularly in comparison with other texts of the same era. The text often quotes women in direct speech, expressing views that men are advised to take seriously. The discussion of the reasons why women become unfaithful, for instance, rejects the traditional patriarchal party line that one finds in most Sanskrit texts, a line that punishes very cruelly indeed any woman who sleeps with a man other than her husband. The Kama-sutra, by contrast, begins its discussion of adultery with an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: “A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman. But after some consideration, the matter goes no farther (5.1.8).” The text does go on to state that women have less concern for morality than men have, and does assume that women don’t think about anything but men. And it is written in the service of the hero, the would-be adulterer, who reasons, if all women are keen to give it away, why shouldn’t one of them give it to him? But the author empathetically imagines various women’s reasons not to commit adultery (of which consideration for dharma comes last, as an afterthought), and the would-be seducer takes the woman’s misgivings seriously, even if only to disarm her (5.1.17-42). This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text how to manipulate and exploit such women, but perhaps inadvertently, it also provides a most perceptive exposition of the reasons why inadequate husbands drive away their wives (5.1.51-54).
Such passages may express a woman’s voice or at least a woman’s point of view. In a culture in which men and women speak to each other (which is to say, in most cultures), we might do best to regard the authors of most texts as androgynes, and the Kama-sutrais no exception. We can find women’s voices, sometimes speaking against their moment in history, perhaps even against their author. By asking our own questions, which the author may or may not have considered, we can see that his text does contain many answers to them, embedded in other questions and answers that may have been more meaningful to him.
The Kama-sutra assumes a kind of sexual freedom for women that would have appalled Manu but simply does not interest Kautilya. To begin with, the text of the Kama-sutra was intended for women as well as men. Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least (courtesans and the daughters of kings and ministers of state) should read his text and that others should learn its contents in other ways, as people in general were expected to know the contents of texts without actually reading them (1.3.1-14). Book 3 devotes one chapter to advice to virgins trying to get husbands (3.4.36-37), and book 4 consists of instructions for wives (the descriptions of co-wives jockeying for power could have served as the script for the opening of the Ramayana). Book 6 is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans of Pataliputra, presumably for their own use.
Vatsyayana is also a strong advocate for women’s sexual pleasure. He tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and may even leave him for another (3.2.35; 4.2.31-35). If, as the context suggests, this woman is married, the casual manner in which Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast with position assumed by Manu. The Kama-sutra also acknowledges that women could use magicgo to control their husbands, though it regards this as a last resort (4.1.19-21).48 Vatsyayana also casually mentions, among the women that one might not only sleep with but marry (1.5.22), not only “secondhand” women (whom Manu despises as “previously had by another man”) but widows: “a widow who is tormented by the weakness of the senses . . . finds, again, a man who enjoys life and is well endowed with good qualities (4.2.31-34).”
MARRIAGE AND RAPE
The basic agreement of the three principal shastras, as well as their divergent emphases, is manifest in their different rankings of the eight forms of marriage that all three list.
Let’s begin with Manu, who ranks the marriages in this order, each named after the presiding deity or supernatural figure(s):
1. Brahma: A man gives his daughter to a good man he has summoned.
2. Gods: He gives her, in the course of a sacrifice, to the officiating priest.
3. Sages: He gives her after receiving from the bridegroom a cow and a bull.
4. The Lord of Creatures: He gives her by saying, “May the two of you fulfill your dharma together.”
5. Antigods: A man takes the girl because he wants her and gives as much wealth as he can to her relatives and to the girl herself.
6. Centaurs (Gandharvas): The girl and her lover join in sexual union, out of desire.
7. Ogres (Rakshasas): A man forcibly carries off a girl out of her house, screaming and weeping, after he has killed, wounded, and broken.
8. Ghouls (Pishachas): The lowest and most evil of marriages takes place when a man secretly has sex with a girl who is asleep, drunk, or out of her mind (3.20.21-36).
Manu insists that the marriages of the ghouls and the antigods should never be performed and that for all classes but Brahmins, the best marriage is when the couple desire each other.gp
The Artha-shastra defines marriages much more briefly, names them differently, and puts them in a different order:
1. Brahma.
2. Lord of Creatures.
3. Sages.
4. Gods.
5. Centaurs.
6. Antigods (receiving a dowry).
7. Ogres (taking her by force).
8. Ghouls (taking her asleep or drunk) (3.2.2-9).
Kautilya regards the first four as lawful with the sanction of the father of the bride, and the last four with the sanction of her father and the mother, because they are the ones who get the bride-price for her (3.2.10-11). Here, as usual, where Manu’s hierarchy depends on class, Kautilya’s depends on money. The Kama-sutra never lists the marriages at all, nor does it discuss the first four, but it gives detailed instructions on how to manage the three that are ranked last in Manu: the centaur, ghoul, and ogre marriages (3.5.12-30).
A dharma-sutra in the third century BCE lists only six forms of marriages;49 it was left for all three of the later shastras to add the two last and worst forms, rape and drugging, a change that signals a significant loss for women. By regarding these two as worse than the other forms of marriage, but not to be ruled out, the shastras simultaneously legitimized rape as a form of marriage and gave some degree of legal sanction, retroactively, to women who had been raped. The inclusion of rape in all three lists might be taken as evidence that a wide divergence of customs was actually tolerated in India at that time, though as we have already heard Vatsyayana explicitly state, the fact that something is mentioned in a text is not proof that people should (or do) actually do it. That is, where Manu tells you not to do it and then how to do it, the Kama-sutra tells you how to do it and then not to do it. But both instances are evidence that the shastras acknowledge the validity, if not the virtue, of practices they do not like.
As for their differences, not surprisingly, the Kama-sutra ranks the love match (the centaur wedding of mutual consent) as the best form of marriage (“because it gives pleasure and costs little trouble and no formal courtship, and because its essence is mutual love [3.5.30]”), while Manu ranks it the best for all classes except Brahmins, and Kautilya, ever the cynic, ranks it with the bad marriages (though as the best of that second quartet). Clearly there was quite a range of opinions about the way to treat brides at this time, some hearkening back to the earlier freedom of women at the time of the Mahabharata, others anticipating the narrowing of women’s options in the medieval period.
THE THIRD NATURE: MEN AS WOMEN
One subject on which Manu and Vatsyayana express widely divergent opinions is homosexuality. Classical Hinduism is in general significantly silent on the subject of homoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty virulent homophobia.50 The dharma textbooks generally ignore, stigmatize, or penalize male homosexual activity: Manu prescribes either loss of caste (11.68) or the mildest of sanctions, a ritual bath (11.174), in dramatic contrast with the heavy penalties, including death, for heterosexual crimes like adultery; the Artha-shastra stipulates the payment of just a small fine (3.18.4, 4.13.236). Most Sanskrit texts regard atypical sexual or gender behavior 51 as an intrinsic part of the nature of the person who commits such acts and refer to such a person with the Sanskrit word kliba, which has traditionally been translated as “eunuch,” but did not primarily mean “eunuch.” Kliba includes a wide range of meanings under the general rubric of “a man who doesn’t do what a man’s gotta do,” gq a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a male suffering from failure, distortion, and lack. It is a catchall term that the shastras used to indicate a man who was in their terms sexually dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), including someone who was sterile or impotent, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, a hermaphrodite, and finally, a man who had been castrated (for men were castrated in punishment for sexual crimes in ancient India, though such men were not used in harems). “An effeminate man” or, more informally and pejoratively, a “pansy” is probably as close as English can get.
But the Kama-sutra departs from this view in significant ways, providing, once again, an alternative view of Hindu social customs. It does not use the pejorative term kliba at all, but speaks instead of a “third nature” or perhaps a “third sexuality” in the sense of sexual more literally, “what is made before”), from pra (“before”) and kri (the verb “to make”), is a term that we have encountered twice in other forms: as the natural language Prakrit in contrast with the artificial language Sanskrit and as the word for “matter” in contrast with “spirit” (purusha).gr Here is what the Kama-sutra has to say about the third nature:
There are two sorts of third nature, in the form of a woman and in the form of a man. The one in the form of a woman imitates a woman’s dress, chatter, grace, emotions, delicacy, timidity, innocence, frailty, and bashfulness. The act that is done in the sexual organ is done in her mouth, and they call that “oral sex.” She gets her sexual pleasure and erotic arousal as well as her livelihood from this, living like a courtesan. That is the person of the third nature in the form of a woman (2.9.6-11).
The Kama-sutra says nothing more about this cross-dressing male, with his stereotypical female gender behavior, but it discusses the fellatio technique of the closeted man of the third nature, who presents himself not as a woman but as a man, a masseur, in considerable sensual detail, in the longest consecutive passage in the text describing a physical act, and with what might even be called gusto (2.9.12-24). Two verses that immediately follow the section about the third nature describe men who seem bound to one another by discriminating affection rather than promiscuous passion (2.9.35-36). These men are called men-about-town, the term used to designate the hetero (or even metro) sexual heroes of the Kama-sutra. In striking contrast with workingmen of the third nature, always designated by the pronoun “she” no matter whether she dresses as a man or as a woman, these men who are bound by affection are described with nouns and pronouns that unambiguously designate males, yet they are grouped with women. Vatsyayana remarks casually that some people list a person of the third nature as a “different” sort of woman who may be a man’s lover (1.5.27). Perhaps, then, they are bisexuals.
Vatsyayana is unique in the literature of the period in describing lesbian activity. He does this at the beginning of the chapter about the harem, in a brief passage about what he calls “Oriental customs” (5.6.2-4). (The use of the term “Oriental,” or “Eastern,” for what Vatsyayana regards as a disreputable lesbian practice in what was soon to be a colonized part of the Gupta Empire—indeed, the eastern part—suggests that “Orientalism” began not with the British but with the Orientals themselves.) These women use dildos, as well as bulbs, roots, or fruits that have the form of the male organ, and statues of men that have distinct sexual characteristics. But they engage in sexual acts with one another not through the kind of personal choice that drives a man of the third nature, but only in the absence of men, as is sometimes said of men in prison or English boys in boarding schools: “The women of the harem cannot meet men, because they are carefully guarded; and since they have only one husband shared by many women in common, they are not satisfied. Therefore they give pleasure to one another with the following techniques.” The commentary makes this explicit, and also helpfully suggests the particular vegetables that one might use: “By imagining a man, they experience a heightened emotion that gives extreme satisfaction. These things have a form just like the male sexual organ: the bulbs of arrowroot, plantain, and so forth; the roots of coconut palms, breadfruit, and so forth; and the fruits of the bottle-gourd, cucumber, and so forth (5.6.2).” One can imagine little gardens of plantain and cucumber being tenderly cultivated within the inner courtyards of the palace. The Kama-sutra makes only one brief reference to women who may have chosen women as sexual partners in preference to men (7.1.20; cf. Manu 8.369-70), and it never refers to women of this type as people of a “third nature.” Still, here is an instance in which ancient Hindu attitudes to human behavior are far more liberal than those that have prevailed in Europe and America for most of their history.
THE ESCAPE CLAUSE
The shastras present, from time to time, diametrically opposed, even contradictory opinions on a particular subject, without coming down strongly in favor of one or the other. One striking example of an apparent contradiction is Manu’s discussion of the levirate (niyoga), the law that allows a woman to sleep with her husband’s brother when the husband has failed to produce a male heir, a situation that frames the birth of the fathers of the Mahabharata heroes. Manu says that you should carry out the niyoga; in the next breath, he says that you should not, that it is not recommended, that it is despised (9.56-63, 9.64-68). The commentaries (and later scholars) explicitly regard these two sections as mutually contradictory. But Manu does mean both of them: He is saying that this is what one has to do in extremity, but that it is really a very bad thing to do, and that, if you do it, you should not enjoy it, and you should only do it once. If you have to do it, you must be very, very careful.
That is the way in which one should regard other apparent contradictions in Manu, such as the statement (repeated ad nauseam) that one must never kill a Brahmin and the statement: “A man may without hesitation kill anyone who attacks him with a weapon in his hand, even if it is his guru, a child or an old man, or a Brahmin thoroughly versed in the Veda, whether he does it openly or secretly; rage befalls rage (8.350-51).” One can similarly resolve Manu’s diatribes against the bride-price with his casual explanations of the way to pay it (3.51-54, 9.93-100, 8.204, 8.366). But it is not difficult to make sense of all this: Ideally, you should not sleep with your brother’s wife or kill a Brahmin or accept a bride-price; but there are times when you cannot help doing it, and then Manu is there to tell you how to do it. This is what you do when caught between a rock and a hard place; it is the best you can do in a no-win situation to which there is no truly satisfactory solution.
The Sanskrit term for the rock and the hard place is apad, which may be translated “in extremity,” an emergency when normal rules do not apply, when all bets are off. Apad is often paired with dharma in the phrase apad-dharma, the right way to act in an emergency. It is the most specific of all the dharmas, even more specific than one’s own dharma (sva-dharma), let alone general dharma; indeed, it is the very opposite of sanatana or sadharana dharma, the dharma for everyone, always. Apad is further supplemented by other loophole concepts such as adversity (anaya), distress (arti), and near starvation (kshudha). In a famine a father may kill his son and Brahmins may eat dogs (10.105-08), which would otherwise make them “dog cookers.” The polluting power of dogs is overlooked in another context as well: “A woman’s mouth is always unpolluted, as is a bird that knocks down a fruit; a calf is unpolluted while the milk is flowing, and a dog is unpolluted when it catches a wild animal (5.130).” That is, since you want to eat the animal that the dog has caught, you need to redefine its mouth as pure, for that occasion.
The emergency escape clause is further bolstered by recurrent references to what is an astonishingly subjective standard of moral conduct (2.6, 12, 223; 4.161, 12.27, 37). Thus the elaborate web of rules, which, if followed to the letter, would paralyze human life entirely, is equally elaborately unraveled by Manu through the escape clauses. Every knot tied in one verse is untied in another verse; the constrictive fabric that he weaves in the central text he unweaves in the subtext of apad, as Penelope in Homer’s Odysseycarefully unwove at night what she had woven in the day.
Other apparent contradictions turn out to be conflations of realistic and idealized approaches to moral quandaries. Idealism, rather than realism, asserts itself in the framework of the shastras. But if the shastras themselves acknowledged the need to escape from the system, how seriously did rank-and-file Hindus take it? Many a young man must have seduced, or been seduced by, his guru’s wife. (This situation must have been endemic, given both Manu’s paranoid terror of it and its likelihood in a world in which young women married old men who had young pupils.) How likely was such a man, afterward, in punishment, to “sleep on a heated iron bed or embrace a red-hot metal cylinder . . . or cut off his penis and testicles, hold them in his two cupped hands, and set out toward the south-west region of Ruin, walking straight ahead until he dies (11.104-05)”? Surely none but the most dedicated masochist would turn down the milder alternatives “to dispel the crime of violating his guru’s marriage-bed” that Manu, as always, realistically offers: “Or he should restrain his sensory powers and eat very little for three months, eating food fit for an oblation or barley-broth (11.106-07).” How do we know that anyone ever did any of this?gs Who believed the Brahmins? How was Manu used? The shastraswere composed by the twice born, for the twice born, and (largely) of the twice born, but “twice born” is a tantalizingly imprecise term. Often it means any of the three upper classes, but usually it means Brahmins alone.
There was a curious lack of communication between theory and practice at this time; the information on pigments and measurements in the shastras on painting and architecture, respectively, do not correspond to the actual pigments and measurements of statuary, nor, on the other hand, is the extraordinary quality of the metal in the famous “Iron Pillar” of Mehrauli supported by the known existence of any treatise on metallurgy.52 The Kama-sutra comments explicitly on this gap between theory and practice, and for Manu there are several quite plausible possible scenarios that will apply in different proportions to different situations: Manu may be describing actual practices that everyone does, or that some people do, that some or all do only because he tells them to, or imagined practices that no one would dream of doing.
Nor was Manu the basis on which most Hindus decided what to do and what not to do; local traditions, often functioning as vernacular commentaries on Manu (much as case law functions as a commentary on the American Constitution), did that. Manu is not so much a law code as it is a second-order reflection on a law code, a meditation on what a law code is all about, on the problems raised by law codes. But in the realm of the ideal, Manu is the cornerstone of the Brahmin vision of what human life should be, a vision to which Hindus have always paid lip service and to which in many ways many still genuinely aspire. Like all shastras, it influenced expectations, tastes, and judgments, beneath the level of direct application of given cases. Often it set a mark that no one was expected to hit; sometimes it acknowledged the legitimacy of practices that it did not in fact encourage. The Kama-sutra too makes this distinctionnicely when it argues, in the only verse that appears twice in the text, once in regard to oral sex and once in regard to the use of drugs: “The statement that ‘There is a text for this’ does not justify a practice (2.9.41; 7.2.55).” The shastrastherefore do not tell us what people actually did about anything, but as theoretical treatises they constitute one of the great cosmopolitan scientific literatures of the ancient world.