CHAPTER 14

GODDESSES AND GODS IN THE EARLY PURANAS
300 to 600 CE

CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES CE)

320-550 The Gupta dynasty reigns from Pataliputra

c. 400 Kalidasa writes Sanskrit plays and long poems

405-411 Faxian visits India

455-467 The Huns attack North India

c. 460-77 The Vakataka dynasty completes the caves at Ajanta

350-750 The Harivamsha (c. 450) and the early Puranas are composed: Brahmanda (350-950), Kurma (550-850), Markandeya (250-550), Matsya (250-500), Padma (750-1000), Shiva (750-1350), Skanda (700-1150), Vamana (450-900), Varaha (750)

THE FIRE OF SHIVA AND KAMA

Surely the fire of Shiva’s anger still burns in you today,
like the fire of the mare in the ocean;
for how else, Kama, could you be so hot
as to reduce people like me to ashes?

Kalidasa, Shakuntala,¹ c. 400 CE

The mythology that pits Shiva’s ascetic heat against Kama’s erotic arrows of flame (Shiva burns Kama’s body to ashes, as we shall see) and the ever-present threat of the doomsday mare remain at the heart of both Puranic mythology and Sanskrit court literature sponsored by the rulers of the Gupta Empire. As popular traditions infuse Sanskrit texts and rituals, the sectarian male gods Shiva and Vishnu^hh continue to grow in power and complexity, though goddesses now begin to take center stage.

THE AGE OF GOLD

Leaving South India for the north and doubling back a bit in time, we encounter another trunk of the banyan tree that was growing steadily all the time we were sojourning in the south. While the Pallavas and Pandyas and Cholas were sorting one another out, the Gupta Empire, founded by Chandra Gupta I, spread across all of northern and much of central India: the largest empire since the fall of the Mauryas in the third century BCE. The Guptas confused matters by using the second half of the first name of the first Maurya as their dynastic name, so that Chandra Gupta I echoes Chandragupta Maurya, a kind of palimpsest of names. (The Gupta founding date [c. 324 CE] also mirrors the Maurya founding date [c. 324 BCE].) The Guptas wrote over the Mauryas: The Allahabad inscription of 379 CE (detailing the conquest of North India by Samudra Gupta [c. 335-76 CE] and his humiliation of the southern rulers) is a palimpsest written on an Ashokan pillar.²

Chandra Gupta II (376-415 CE), inheriting a large empire from his father, Samudra Gupta, completed the Guptas’ subjugation of North India (the “conquest of the world,” or dig-vijaya) and continued his father’s policy by extending control over neighboring territories, whether by war or diplomacy (war by other means). The evidence for this control now begins to be quite a bit more substantial than the usual megalomaniac epigraphical chest beating. As there were Greek visitors to the Mauryas, so there are Chinese visitors to the Guptas, whose testimony often substantiates other sources; though they are often no more resistant to local mythmaking than were their Greek predecessors, it is always useful to have a foreign bias to set against the native bias to give us a cross fix.

The Chinese Buddhist Faxian (also spelled Fa Hsien) made a pilgrimage to India in 402 and, after his return to China, translated into Chinese the many Sanskrit Buddhist texts he brought back. He also left detailed descriptions of India, particularly Pataliputra, from 405 to 411, in his “Record of Buddhist Kingdoms.” He noted with approval the means for dispensing charity and medicine and the free rest houses and hospitals that the emperor maintained. He also corroborated the claim, made in a Gupta inscription, that no one who deserved to be punished was “over-much put to torture”;³ according to Faxian, “Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand.” And, he added, “throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalas only.”⁴ (Chandalas are Pariahs.) As usual, the foreigner misinteprets the ideals of non-violence and teetotaling as actual practices. As for class conditions, one of Faxian’s few criticisms of the Gupta social system was that the Chandalas were forced to do degrading tasks such as carrying out corpses and had to strike a piece of wood as they entered a town to warn upper-caste people to turn away as they approached.⁵ (A later Chinese visitor, Xuan Zang, in the seventh century, observed that executioners and scavengers were forced to live outside the city.)

The Gupta style was imperial, widely exported to make its mark in Southeast Asia as well as South Asia. European historians, themselves imperialists, quite naturally thought that Empire was Good for You, that culture flourished under widespread political consolidation. The extent and the character of the rich Gupta art-historical record inspired European historians to stamp the label of “classical” on the art, architecture, and literature of the Guptas, which they also regarded as “classical” in the sense of “classics”: They reminded them of Greek art. They praised the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (Winckelmann) of Gupta art in contrast with the “florid” Hindu temples and texts of subsequent periods that they regarded as decadent.⁶ They particularly loved the art of the Gandhara region in the Northwest, which is far more Greek than Indian (lots of drapery on everyone) and which they praised for its anatomical accuracy. They called this the Golden Age of Indian culture, a Eurocentric term, since it was the Greeks who labeled the first age Golden (while the Hindus called it the Winning Age).

MATHEMATICS AND ASTRONOMY

The Gupta court was famous for its “nine gems,” the ancient equivalent of MacArthur geniuses, including several scientists who helpfully paid attention to data relevant to their birth dates. The astronomer and mathematician^hi Aryabhata,⁷ born in 476, was first to calculate the solar year accurately; he also made an explicit statement that the apparent westward motion of the stars is due to the spherical earth’s rotation about its axis, and he correctly ascribed the luminosity of the moon and planets to reflected sunlight. His works circulated in the northwest of India and contributed greatly to the development of Islamic astronomy.

The astronomer Varahamihira (505-587) composed a masterful compendium of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and Indian astronomy; made major advances in trigonometry; and discovered a version of Pascal’s triangle. He is also well known for his contributions to iconography and astrology. The mathematician Brahmagupta (598-665) defined zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself. Committed to the theory of the four Ages, he employed Aryabhata’s system of starting each day at midnight but rejected Aryabhata’s statement that the earth is a spinning sphere. He also dismissed Jaina cosmological views. Like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta profoundly influenced Islamic and Byzantine astronomy. The astronomical and mathematical achievements of the Gupta court show that this period’s efflorescence of art and literature—both religious and secular—was part of a broader pattern of creativity and innovation.

Other forms of inventiveness also flourished under the Guptas. Around this time someone in India invented chess. It began as a four-player war game called chaturanga (“four-limbs”), a Sanskrit name for a quadripartite battle formation mentioned in theMahabharata. Chaturanga flourished in northwestern India by the seventh century and is regarded as the earliest precursor of modern chess because it had two key features found in all later chess variants: Different pieces had different powers (unlike games like checkers and Go), and victory was based on one piece, the king in modern chess. (“Checkmate” is a word derived from the Persian/Arabic shah-mat [“the king is dead].”) There was therefore an atmosphere in which many branches of learning thrived.

THE AGE OF FOOL’S GOLD?

The dynasty soon gave way to a number of weaker kingdoms and to the Huns, who nipped any subsequent budding Gupta emperors in the bud until the Turks and Sassanian Persians finally stopped them for good.⁸ Samudra Gupta had performed a horse sacrifice at which he allegedly gave away ten thousand cows, and his prolific gold coins abound in magnificent horses.⁹ But when the Huns severed trade routes in the north, they cut off the vital supply of equine bloodstock overland from central Asia to India. From now on, horses had to be imported to India by sea from Arabia, which made them even more expensive than before and put the Arabs entirely in control of the horse trade. The Guptas’ famous gold coinage became first debased, then crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, scarce, and finally nonexistent,¹⁰ as the empire disintegrated into multiple small kingdoms. But how golden was the Gupta age even in its prime?

Again we encounter a trick of the available light: Because we have Faxian and a lot of inscriptions, we think we know the Guptas, and many historians have been caught up in the spirit of the Guptas’ own self-aggrandizement. The Guptas did their boasting in Sanskrit, the language they chose for their courts, a move of conscious archaism. Prior to this, kings had done their boasting in the language that ordinary people spoke, one of the Prakrits, like the Magadhi of the Buddha and of Ashoka. Brahmins had continued to use Sanskrit in such a way that a bilingual literary culture underlay such great texts as the Mahabharata and the Puranas, the medieval Sanskrit (and, later, vernacular) compendiums of myth and ritual, which began to be assembled during the Gupta age.¹¹ The Guptas’ use of Sanskrit and patronage of Sanskrit literature also contributed to the Euro-American identification of their age as classical.

But Gupta art, however pretty, was not nearly as imaginative or vigorous as that of the ages that preceded and followed it; it seems lifeless and bloodless, classical in the sense of “boring,” in comparison with the earlier Kushana sculpture and, later, the voluptuous statues of the Cholas, the vibrant images of Basohli painting. In my humble opinion, Indian art is better than Greek art and therefore much better than art (such as Gupta art) that imitates Hellenistic art (which is second-rate Greek art). The architecture of the first Gupta temples, such as those at Aihole, Badami, and Pattadakal, or the temple of the Ten Avatars (Dashavatara) at Deogarh, in Uttar Pradesh (c. sixth to seventh century), cannot compare with the temples built from the tenth century, the “dazzling ornamented surfaces” of Khajuraho, Konarak, Tanjavur, and Madurai, to name just a few.¹² Other scholars too have judged the Gupta Age to be one of “extraordinary restraint,” which eliminated options and alternatives for those “living in the strait-jacket of orthodox Hinduism.”¹³

It is a general perversity of Indian history that its greatest architectural monuments—both the great temple clusters and the great palaces and forts—were created not in the centers of power like Pataliputra but in relatively remote provinces, and this is certainly true of the Gupta Age.¹⁴ It was in Ajanta, a fairly remote town in the Deccan, that Harisena of the Vakataka dynasty (c. 460-477), who owed nothing to Gupta patronage—or, more to the point, to Gupta control—completed the great caves whose walls are alive with the first examples of what has been called narrative painting:^hjscenes depicting the life of the Buddha, his previous lives (Jatakas), a storm at sea, a shipwreck, and the only panoramic battle scene known from ancient India.¹⁵ Great things, golden things, did happen in the Gupta Age, but not always at the hands of the Gupta rulers.

Moreover, the artisans who carved the temples and who ranked socially with musicians and dancing girls, types that always made the Brahmins nervous,¹⁶ did not thrive in this period, as Romila Thapar points out:

The description of the Gupta period as one of classicism is relatively correct regarding the upper classes, who lived well according to descriptions in their literature and representations in their art. The more accurate, literal evidence that comes from archeology suggests a less glowing life-style for the majority. Materially, excavated sites reveal that the average standard of living was higher in the preceding period.¹⁷

Yet, as we are about to see, that lower-class majority made its mark upon the upper classes.

FROM THE VILLAGE TO THE COURT: LOST IN TRANSLATION

Sanskrit court poetry drew on earlier Sanskrit texts, as one would expect from the general force of tradition and intertextuality. But it also drew upon folk traditions, as indeed the earlier Sanskrit texts had often done. In translating the plot from one idiom to another, or even from oral/written epic to court dramas, the Gupta poets edited out a great deal, but not all, of the power and dignity of women. One example will stand for many.

The poet Kalidasa, generally regarded as the greatest poet in the Sanskrit tradition, the Shakespeare of India, reworked in his play Shakuntala (more precisely “The Recognition of Shakuntala”) a story that the Mahabharata tells at some length: King Dushyanta encounters Shakuntala in the forest while he is hunting, killing too many animals and terrifying the rest. He marries her with the ceremony of mutual consent (the Gandharva marriage or marriage of the centaurs) and returns to his court; when she brings their son to him at court, he lies, swearing that he never saw her before, until a disembodied voice from the sky proclaims the child his, and then he says he knew it all along (1.64-69). Dushyanta’s cruelty to his sexual partner is foreshadowed by his out-of-control hunting—the two vices are closely connected in the Hindu view—and hardly mitigated by his statement that he rejected Shakuntala because of his fear of public disapproval, an argument that rang equally hollow when Rama used it to reject Sita. Dushyanta is one of a large crowd of Mahabharata kings who had children secretly, and Shakuntala one of many women who had them illegitimately.

Whereas the story in the Mahabharata is about power and inheritance, Kalidasa turns it into a story about desire and memory. Kalidasa probably had the patronage of the Gupta dynasty, perhaps Chandra Gupta II.^hk (His poem The Birth of the Prince, ostensibly about the birth of the son of Shiva and Parvati—the god Skanda, also called Kumara [“the Youth” or “the Prince”]—may also be an extended pun to celebrate the birth of Kumara Gupta.) The story of Shakuntala was important to the Guptas, for the child of Shakuntala and Dushyanta, named Bharata, was one of the founders of the dynasty that the Guptas claimed for their lineage.^hl Kalidasa had his work cut out for him to transform Bharata’s father from a lying cad^hm to a sympathetic lover,¹⁸ and to give credit where credit’s due, he did at least feel that Dushyanta needed some sort of excuse for treating Shakuntala as he did. And so he fell back upon the tried-and-true folk device of the magic ring of memory¹⁹ and the curse of an angry Brahmin (the presbyter ex machina): A sage whom Shakuntala neglected in her lovesick distraction put a curse on her, ensuring that the king would forget her until he saw the ring that he (the king) had given her. Shakuntala lost the ring; Dushyanta therefore honestly did not remember her until a fisherman found the ring in a fish that had swallowed it (and was caught and served at Dushyanta’s table). Then Dushyanta was terribly, terribly sorry about it all, and he searched until he found Shakuntala and his son at last. In this retelling, Shakuntala’s mistake (a trivial breach of ascetiquette) injures Dushyanta’s mind, through a kind of transfer of karma, or transitive imagination; it’s really all her fault. Dushyanta suffers for actions committed by someone else, actions of which he is completely innocent,²⁰ but of course he is also guilty of an even more serious forgetfulness than the one that Shakuntala suffers for. At the same time, the curse on Shakuntala merely activates what is already there in nuce in Dushyanta, his forgetfulness. The whole fishy story gets Dushyanta (and Kalidasa) out of what subsequent Indian scholars recognized as a true moral dilemma.

Shakuntala loses her agency in Kalidasa’s hands. In the Mahabharata she is a wise woman who discourses at length on dharma; in Kalidasa she is hardly more than a child and says little when the king accuses her of lying; indeed most of her words reach us only because the king tells us she said them. Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, still pregnant, is snatched up by her celestial mother, just as Sita is after Rama has abandoned her, also pregnant. Indeed the parallels with Sita go further: Both women are daughters of supernatural women (Shakuntala the daughter of the celestial nymph Menaka, Sita the daughter of the earth) and are themselves supernatural (in one reading, Shakuntala is a celestial nymph²¹), both come from another world to bear the king a son (or sons), and both disappear when the king abuses them. Sisters in the plot, they are also the cousins of the equine goddesses Saranyu and Urvashi.

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

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

DIVERSITY AND SECTARIAN WORSHIP

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

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

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

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

POPULAR TRADITIONS IN THE EARLY SANSKRIT PURANAS: FOUND IN TRANSLATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE BRAHMIN FILTER

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

The village traditions and local folk traditions, which the anthropologist Robert Redfield decades ago labeled “little,”³⁶ in fact constitute most of Hinduism and are one of the main sources even of the so-called pan-Indian traditions (such as the Puranas), which Redfield called the “great” tradition. “Little” carries pejorative as well as geographical connotations, not just small individual villages but a minor, cruder, less civilized tradition beneath scholarly contempt. Yet in terms of both the area that the villages cover in Indiaas a whole and their populations (even now 72.2 percent of the national total, according to the 2001 census³⁷), not to mention the size of their creative contributions, the terms should really be reversed: the pan-Indian tradition is little, while the village cultures are a (the) great tradition.³⁸

What the so-called pan-Indian tradition in effect designates is the lettered, written tradition, the literary tradition, which can claim to be “pan” to the extent that the names of some texts—the Veda, the Ramayana—are known all over India (and well beyond), though not everyone in India knows more than an outline of their contents.

We might better use the Sanskrit/Hindi terms and call the local traditions deshi or sthala (terms meaning “local” or “from our place” or “from our homeland”). The sthala Puranas are a genre glorifying not a specific deity but a specific temple or town, usually composed in the vernacular language of that special place. History is local; the texts respond less to the policies of the emperor a thousand miles away than to the mood swings of the local tax collector. The village is also one of the places where we will find the comic vision of the common people, glorying in Hinduism’s ability to laugh at its own gods, defying the piety of the more puritanical members of the tradition. The folk tradition in particular takes pleasure in mocking Brahmins. The concepts of the pan-Indian tradition, widely but not universally known to Hindus from all parts of the subcontinent and beyond, and even less universally believed, are embroidered on top of a much larger fabric woven in each local community. Tribal people too were being acculturated into Hindu society during this period, resulting in both their contribution of stories to the Puranas and scattered depictions of them in those texts.³⁹

Set against this flow of often non-Brahmin ideas into Sanskrit literature was, however, the final filter of the Sanskrit texts, a Brahmin filter, which tried to domesticate it all, or at the very least to frame it in Brahmin ideology, a process that we have noted even in the transition from theMahabharata to Kalidasa. Brahmins’ attitudes to oral folk traditions range from complete ignorance to condemnation but most often amount to appropriating them into their own texts, sometimes in bowdlerized and sanitized forms. Oral (or, better, unwritten) traditions are thus “overwritten” by the literary traditions, which “Hinduize” or “Puranicize” them by consistently changing, in addition to language, food (from meat eating to vegetarianism), caste (from low-caste priests to high Brahmins), and gender (from female storytellers to male).⁴⁰ In later centuries we can trace actual transitions from folktales in various vernaculars (such as Tamil, Bangla, Telugu, and Hindi) to Sanskrit versions that the Brahmins thoroughly reworked, but (hindsight alert!) we cannot assume that the same things happened in the same way centuries earlier; there may have been less, or perhaps more, revision then.

For example, if we take a folktale originally told, in Telugu, by a caste of traders and merchants who were “left-hand” (unclean, lower caste), and compare it with the same tale retold, in a Sanskrit Purana, by the same caste when it has moved up to the status of Vaishyas, some things change: In the folk version, the woman protagonist makes decisions for herself as well as for the caste, while in the Sanskrit version, the Brahmin priest makes all the decisions.⁴¹ Yet vast amounts of folklore do slip through the filter and get into the Puranas more or less intact, so that the Brahmin interpretation of the material does not necessarily erase local color and regional flavor. Sometimes the value system survives the journey, like a wine that travels well, and sometimes it does not. But we need not assume that the Brahmin redactors squeezed all the life out of the stories. The Brahmin sieve was not subtle enough to block entirely the currents of folk literature, which flowed in through every opening, particularly in matters concerning goddesses.

Moreover, by this time the Brahmin hold on Sanskrit had begun to be eroded; Vaishyas could read Sanskrit too, and non-Brahmins used Sanskrit in many secular spheres. More to the point, there were many different sorts of Brahmins, Brahmins of various ranks, often distinguished simply by their geographical location or by the degree of their learning, a distinction we saw even in the Brahmanas. Brahmins were not homogeneous; some were more at home with oral presentations than with reading and writing. We have seen that, in the myths, there were Brahmins among the ogres; now there are references to human Brahmins whose ancestors were said to be ogres.⁴² So too in actual life there were Shudra Brahmins, mleccha Brahmins, Chandala Brahmins, and Nishada Brahmins (who are said to be thieves and fond of fish and meat).⁴³ Some were very close indeed to the folk sources that they incorporated into the Puranas.

SECTARIAN CONTESTS

The tensions between the worshipers of Vishnu and Shiva were relatively mild but important enough to be explicitly addressed in narratives. The concept of a trinity, a triumvirate of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (the Trimurti [Triple Form]), which both Kalidasa and the Markandeya Puranamention, is a misleading convention. (The triumvirate may have been sustained, though not invented, in response to the Christian trinity.) The idea that Brahma is responsible for creation, Vishnu for preservation or maintenance, and Shiva for destruction does not correspond in any way to the mythology, in which both Vishnu and Shiva are responsible for both creation and destruction and Brahma was not worshiped as the other two were. The fifteenth-century poet Kabir, mocking Hinduism in general, also mocks the idea that the trinity represents the trio of the qualities of matter: Vishnu lucidity (sattva), Brahma passion (rajas), and Shiva darkness (tamas).⁴⁴ If one wanted to find a trinity of important deities in Hinduism (as people still do, both as a shortcut through the pantheon and to decorate inclusive wedding invitations), it would be more accurate to speak of Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi, but since there are so many different Vishnus, Shivas, and Devis, even that trinity makes little sense. The relationship between the two major male gods is better viewed as an aspect of Hinduism’s penchant for fusing, with Vishnu and Shiva frequently functioning as a pair, often merged as Hari-Hara.

The relative status of the three members of this trinity is explicitly discussed in a myth that begins with an argument between Brahma and Vishnu (a much-told theme of which we have already encountered one variant) and then segues into another popular myth, the tale of Shiva’s first appearance out of the linga, in the form of a pillar of fire. Vishnu tells the story:

SHIVA APPEARS OUT OF THE LINGA

Once upon a time, when I had swallowed up the whole triple world in darkness, I lay there alone, with all the creatures in my belly. I had a thousand heads and a thousand eyes, and a thousand feet. Then, all of a sudden, I saw the four-headed Brahma, who said to me, “Who are you? Where do you come from? Tell me, sir. I am the maker of the worlds.” I said to him: “I am the maker of the worlds, and also the one who destroys them, again and again.” As the two of us were talking together in this way, each wishing to get the better of the other, we were amazed to see a flame arising in the north. Its brilliance and power made us cup our hands in reverence and bow to it. The flame grew, and Brahma and I ran up to it. It broke through heaven and earth, and in the middle of the flame we saw a linga, blazing with light. It was indescribable, unimaginable, alternately visible and invisible. At first, it measured just a hand’s-breadth, but it kept getting much bigger.

Then Brahma said to me, “Quickly, go down and find out the bottom of this linga. I will go up until I see its top.” I agreed. I kept going down for a thousand years, but I did not reach the bottom of the linga, nor did Brahma find its top. We turned back and met again, amazed and frightened; we paid homage to Shiva, saying, “You create the worlds and destroy them. From you all of the goddesses were born. We bow to you.”

Then he revealed himself and, filled with pity, laughed, like the roar of thunder, and said, “Don’t be afraid. Both of you, eternal, were born from me in the past; Brahma is my right arm, and Vishnu my left arm. I will give you whatever you ask for.” Ecstatic, we said, “Let the two of us always be devoted to you.” “Yes,” said the god of gods, “and create multitudes of progeny.” And he vanished.⁴⁵

This myth about the origins of linga worship recognizes it as a new thing, just as the worship of Shiva was a new thing in the myth of Daksha. The author does not try to authenticate the practice by claiming that it was already there in the Vedas; he has a sense of history, of change, of novelty. In the jockeying for power and status among the three gods, Shiva is clearly supreme, in this text, and Vishnu is second to Brahma. (Other variants of the myth reverse the hierarchy and even account for Brahma’s historical loss of status altogether: Brahma lies, pretending that he did find the end of the linga, and is therefore cursed never to be worshiped again.) By regarding the goddesses as emanations from Shiva, the text subordinates them to him but also emphasizes his connection with them. The hymn of praise for Shiva, which I have greatly abbreviated, is what the worshiper takes away with him or her, a paradigm for the proper worship of the Shiva linga. Here, as so often, beginning with the Vedas, you cannot grasp the power of the text aside from the ritual that is its raison d’être; you have to, as the saying goes, be there.

As the erotic god of the linga as well as the ascetic god of yogis, Shiva straddles the two paths of renunciation and Release. As Lord of the Dance (Nataraja) he dances both the dance of passion (lasya) and the dance that destroys the universe (tandava).⁴⁶ This ambivalence is brilliantly expressed in the myth of Mankanaka:

SHIVA STOPS MANKANAKA FROM DANCING

The sage Mankanaka cut his hand on a blade of sharp kusha grass, and plant sap flowed from the wound. Overjoyed, to excess, he started to dance; and everything in the universe danced with him. The gods, alarmed, reported this to Shiva and asked him to stop Mankanaka from dancing. Shiva took the form of a Brahmin and went to him and asked him, “What has occasioned this joy in you, an ascetic?” “Why, Brahmin,” said the sage, “don’t you see the plant sap flowing from my hand?” The god laughed at him and said, “I am not surprised. Look at this,” and he struck his own thumb with the tip of his finger, and ashes shining like snow poured out of that wound. Then Mankanaka was ashamed, and he fell at Shiva’s feet and said, “You must be Shiva, the Trident-bearer, first of the gods. Grant me a favor; let my ascetic heat remain intact.” Shiva replied, “Your ascetic heat will increase a thousand-fold, and I will dwell in this hermitage with you forever. Any man who bathes in this river and worships me will find nothing impossible to obtain in this world and the other world, and then he will reach the highest place, by my grace.”⁴⁷

The mortal ascetic dances with joy when his magic transmutes blood (flowing from a wound made by a blade of the sacred grass that is used in Vedic rituals) into plant sap (a vegetarian move), but his dancing is as excessive as his asceticism was; extreme vegetarianism has turned his very blood to vegetable sap. Shiva uses his own far greater ascetic power to change blood to ashes, the ashes of corpses but also the ashes of the god Kama, whom he has both destroyed and absorbed—the symbol of the seed of life transfixed in death. In this way he teaches the sage that death is more amazing than life. The ending grants a blessing not to the person who hears the story, as earlier texts generally do, but to the person who bathes in this river, the tirtha. This is a good example of the transition from a pan-Indian ideal (for the basic text could be recited anywhere) to a more local concentration of sanctity, a particular point of pilgrimage.

PURANIC GODDESSES

The Puranas begin to tell stories about goddesses. Though there are a few independent goddesses in the Rig Veda, they are generally personifications of abstract nouns or little more than the wives of their husbands, such as Indrani, “Mrs. Indra,” the wife of the god Indra. The births of Draupadi and Sita reveal that they began as goddesses (and Draupadi went on to become a goddess with a sect of her own), though the Mahabharata and Ramayana treat them by and large as mortal women. Now, however, in the early Puranas, we begin to get a vibrant mythology of independent goddesses.

Though Hindu gods are often grouped under a monotheistic umbrella, so that all gods are said to be aspects of one particular god (sometimes Vishnu, sometimes Shiva) or, more often, aspects of the ineffable monistic brahman, people seldom speak of the God, Deva.^hn Yet though the goddesses of India are equally various, people (both scholars and the authors of Sanskrit texts) often speak of the Goddess, Devi, and tend to treat all the other goddesses as nothing more than aspects of Devi, whereas they all are actually quite different. One gets the impression that in the dark, all goddesses are gray. (So too while gods, ogres, and antigods often have extra heads—Brahma has four, Shiva five, Skanda six, Ravana ten—Puranic goddesses not only seldom have more than one—they have lots of arms, but not heads—but often have less than one; several of them are beheaded. This is a gendered pattern that makes one stop and think.)

I would prefer to treat the Hindu goddesses individually, though reserving the right to generalize about them.

CHANDIKA, THE BUFFALO CRUSHER (MAHISHA-MARDINI)

We will never know for how many centuries she was worshiped in India by people who had no access to Sanskrit texts and whose voices we therefore cannot hear. Kushana coins depict Durga and Parvati, and a Kushana image from Mathura, perhaps from the second century CE, depicts a tree spirit (Yakshi), perhaps prefiguring Durga, with a cringing dwarf under her feet.^ho We have noted a few distant early warnings, such as possible sources in the Indus Valley, and there are more substantial hints of the worship of a goddess in the Mahabharata: tantalizingly brief references to the seven or eight “Little Mothers” (Matrikas), dark, peripheral, harmful, especially for children, and the Great Kali (Maha-Kali), and to the goddess of Death and Night who appears in a vision in theBook of the Night Raid, right before the massacre begins (10.8.64). The Mahabharata also tells of gorgeous supernatural women who seduce antigods so that the gods can overpower them; one of these, Mohini, is really just Vishnu in disguise (1.15-17), and the other, Tilottama, is an Apsaras (2.201-2). But these females do not kill the antigods themselves; Mohini merely distracts them so that the gods can steal the soma (back) from them, and Tilottama gets the antigods Sunda and Upasunda to kill each other over her. It remained for the Puranas to tell of a goddess who killed the antigods herself.

Such a goddess, first under the name of Chandika (“the Fierce”^hp), later often called Durga (“Hard to Get [To]”), bursts onto the Sanskrit scene full grown, like Athene from the head of Zeus, in a complex myth that includes a hymn of a thousand names. Many of the names allude to entire mythological episodes that must have grown onto the goddess, like barnacles on a great ship, gradually for centuries. The founding text is “The Glorification of the Goddess” (Devimahatmya ), a long poem probably interpolated into theMarkandeya Purana (which also tells a number of other stories about powerful women and goddesses) between the fifth and seventh centuries of the Common Era. It is clear from the complexity of “The Glorification of the Goddess” that it must be a compilation of many earlier texts about the goddess, either from other, lost Sanskrit texts or from lost or never preserved vernacular sources, in Magadhi or Tamil, perhaps. Some of the stories may have come from villages or tribal cultures where the goddess had been worshiped for centuries; early in her history she may have been associated with the periphery of society, “tribal or low-caste peoples who worshiped her in wild places.”⁴⁸ Yet by the time of the Markandeya Purana, goddesses were worshiped in both cities and villages, by people all along the economic spectrum.

“Glorification of the Goddess” is the Devi’s “crossover” text, from unknown rituals and local traditions to a pan-Indian Sanskrit text. Why does the Markandeya Purana pay attention to goddesses at this moment? Why now? For one thing, it was a time when devotional texts of all sorts flourished, and since people worshiped Chandika, she too needed to have texts. What may have started out as a local sect began to spread under royal patronage inspired by bhakti. Centuries earlier the Kushanas had put goddesses on their coins; now the stories behind the coins began to circulate too as more valuable narrative currency. At some moment the critical mass of Devi worship forced the Brahmin custodians of Sanskrit narratives to acknowledge it. The Purana goes out of its way to tell us that merchants and kings worshiped her; in the outer frame of the Purana, a sage tells the story of the Goddess of Great Illusion (Mahamaya) to a king who has lost his kingdom and a Vaishya who has lost his wealth and family; at the end of the story the goddess grants each of them what he asks for: The king gets his kingdom (and the downfall of his enemies), while the Vaishya gets not wealth, which he no longer covets, but the knowledge of what he is and what he has (and the downfall of his worldly addictions). Clearly the Vaishya is the man this text greatly prefers.

This is the story it tells about Chandika:

THE KILLING OF THE BUFFALO

Once upon a time, the antigods, led by Mahisha [“Buffalo”], defeated the gods in battle. The gods were so furious that their energies came out of them one by one, and these energies formed the goddess Chandika. The gods also gave her weapons doubled from their own weapons, as well as necklaces and earrings and garlands of lotuses. They gave her a lion for her mount, and the king of snakes gave her a necklace of snakes studded with the large gems that cobras have on their foreheads. When Mahisha, in the form of a water buffalo, saw her, he cried, “Now, who is this?” and he attacked her lion. Eventually, she lassoed him and tied him up. As she cut off the head of the buffalo, he became a lion; as she beheaded the lion, he became a man, with a sword in his hand; then an elephant, and finally a buffalo again. She laughed and drank deep from a divine drink, and her eyes shone red, and the drink reddened her mouth. Then she kicked him on the neck, and as the great antigod came halfway out of the buffalo’s open mouth, she cut off his head with her sword.⁴⁹

The final moment in this story is a scene particularly beloved of artists, who often depict Chandika’s lion chomping on the buffalo’s head while the goddess disposes of the head of the anthropomorphic antigod, who comes out not from the buffalo’s mouth but from his neck after he has been beheaded. The goddess rides on a lion, a Vedic animal; in later centuries, when lions become rare in North India, Chandika and other goddesses are often depicted riding on tigers or sometimes just great big pussycats, as depicted by painters and sculptors who have evidently never seen a tiger, let alone a lion. The myth has been convincingly linked to a ritual that has been documented in many parts of India to this day, the ritual sacrifice of a buffalo, often associated with a sect of Draupadi.⁵⁰Goats too and other animals are frequently sacrificed to the goddess Kali; the animal is decapitated, and its blood is offered to her to drink. In some variants of this ritual, a man, dressed either as the buffalo or as a woman, bites the neck and drinks the blood of the sacrificial animal (usually a lamb or a goat).

We can see patriarchal Sanskritic incursions into this early textual version of the myth, the Brahmin filter as always extracting a toll as the story crossed the linguistic border. Chandika’s power in this text comes not from within herself but from the energy (tejas) of the male gods, as the light of the moon comes from the sun. She is created by re-memberment (the inverse of dismemberments such as that of the Man in “Poem of the Primeval Man”), a not uncommon motif in the ancient texts. Manu, for instance, says (7.3-7) that the first king was created by combining “lasting elements” or “particles” from eight gods.^hq

A. K. Ramanujan once said that you can divide the many goddesses of India into the goddesses of the tooth and the goddesses of the breast.⁵¹ The goddesses of the breast are wives, more or less subservient to husbands, but they do not usually give birth to children (though they sometimes adopt children). Devi is the Great Mother, but we hear little or nothing about her mythological children; we are her children. The tooth goddesses (not at all like tooth fairies) are unmarried, fierce, often out of control. They are killers. They too are generally^hr barren of children, celibate mothers; indeed some of them wear necklaces made of the heads of children and low-slung belts made of children’s hands; with habits like these, it’s a very good thing that they don’t have children of their own. Chandika, whom “Glorification of the Goddess” also calls Ambika (“Little Mother”),^‡ is the paradigmatic tooth goddess in India. She is also both the paradigmatic shakti (“power”) and the paradigmatic possessor of shakti.

Shakti is a creative power that generally takes the place of the power to have children; men give birth without women in many myths, while the goddesses, for all their shakti, are cursed to be barren. Shakti is generally something that a male god, not a goddess, has and that the goddess is. One Upanishad depicts Shiva as a magician who produces the world through his shakti.⁵² Eventually the Puranas used the word to designate the power/wife of any god, often an abstract quantity (a feminine noun in Sanskrit) incarnate as an anthropomorphic goddess. Many female deities, as well as abstract nouns, came to be personified and “wedded” to great gods as their shaktis, such as Lakshmi or Shri (“Prosperity”), the wife of Vishnu. Unlike the independent Vedic goddesses Speech and Night, who stand alone, these consort goddesses appear in Sanskrit texts almost exclusively as wives. Shiva, who inherits much of Indra’s mythology when Indra fades from the pantheon, also inherits Indra’s wife Shachi (a name related to shakti), and so, in many texts, Shiva’s wife—whether she be Parvati or the goddess Kali or Sati—is the most important shakti of all, the role model for the other goddesses who become known as the wives (and shaktis) of other gods. In one text, Shiva emits his own shakti, who then becomes the Goddess that the gods beg to kill the buffalo. ⁵³

But the Chandika of “Glorification of the Goddess” is definitively unmarried, independent, a tooth goddess. Shiva is not her husband but merely the messenger that she sends to challenge other rebellious antigods, in the battle that follows immediately after Mahisha’s death, nor does she become the wife of Mahisha. Therefore she is not the shakti of any particular god, and her shaktis, whatever their origins, ultimately belong to no one but herself; they are the shaktis of a shakti. In the next battle, Chandika emits her own shakti (which howls like a hundred jackals) and absorbs all the gods’ shaktis into her breasts.⁵⁴ In its intertextual context, therefore, “Glorification of the Goddess” stands out as a feminist moment framed by earlier and later texts that deny the shakti her independence.

The pious hope of goddess feminists, and others, that the worship of goddesses is Good for Women is dashed by observations of India, where the power recognized in goddesses certainly does not necessarily encourage men to grant to women—or women to take from men—political or economic powers. Indeed we can see the logic in the fact that it often works the other way around (the more powerful the goddess, the less power for real women), however much we may deplore it: If women are made of shakti—like Chandika, who is her own shakti, rather than like Parvati, who is Shiva’s shakti—and men can only get it by controlling women, women pose a constant threat to men. The conclusion that many men seem to have drawn from this is that women should be locked up and silenced. One defiance of this scenario is the widespread phenomenon of women who are possessed by fierce goddesses, thereby either acquiring or becoming shaktis and being empowered to say and do many things otherwise forbidden.⁵⁵ But in taking the mythology of goddesses as a social charter, the goddess feminists are batting on a sticky wicca.

SATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVA

One goddess who has played an important role in the lives of real women is Sati, the wife of Shiva, who is occasionally implicated in justifications for the custom of widows immolating themselves on their husbands’ pyres, called suttee.

The Mahabharata versions of the story of Daksha’s sacrifice do not mention Daksha’s daughter Sati at all, though sometimes they mention Shiva’s other wife, Parvati (who is not related to Daksha in any way, nor does she herself go to the sacrifice, or die, though her wounded amour propre spurs Shiva to break into the sacrifice). At that stage the conflict, about Rudra’s non-Vedic status, is just between Daksha and Shiva. Several early Puranas too tell the story of Daksha and Rudra/Shiva without mentioning any wife of Shiva’s, or mention her just in passing.⁵⁶ Even in versions that name Sati as the daughter of Daksha, the conflict is still primarily between Vaishnava Brahmins and more heterodox Shaivas. This story is narrated in several of the early Puranas:

SATI COMMITS SUICIDE

Daksha, the father of Sati, insulted Shiva by failing to invite him or Sati to a great sacrifice to which everyone else (including Sati’s sisters) was invited. Sati, overcome with shame and fury, committed suicide by generating an internal fire in which she immolated herself. Enraged, Shiva came to Daksha’s sacrifice, destroyed it, and—after Daksha apologized profusely—restored it.⁵⁷

Sati is not a sati (a woman who commits suttee). Her husband is not dead; indeed, by definition, he can never die. But she dies, usually by fire, and those two textual facts are sometimes taken up as the basis for suttee in later Hindu practice. The compound sati-dharma thus has several layers of meaning: it can mean the way that any Good Woman (which is what sati means in Sanskrit), particularly a woman true to her husband, should behave, or it can mean the way that this one woman named Sati behaved. Only much later does it come to mean the act of a woman who commits the religious act of suttee, the immolation of a woman on her dead husband’s pyre (for which the Sanskrit term was usually “going with” the husband [saha-gamana] or “dying after” him [anu-marana]).

PARVATI, THE WIFE OF SHIVA

Sati dies and is reborn as Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain”), the daughter of the great mountain Himalaya, the mountain range where Shiva is often said to live, generally on Mount Kailasa. Parvati is a typical breast goddess, confined and defined by her marriage. But before Parvati could marry Shiva, she had to win him, no easy task, since Shiva had undertaken a vow of chastity. She did it with the help of the god of erotic love, Kama incarnate. The Mahabharata refers, briefly, to the encounter between Kama and Shiva, the latter here referred to as a brahma-charin (that is, under a vow of celibacy): “Shiva, the great brahma-charin , did not give himself over to the pleasures of lust. The husband of Parvati extinguished Kama when Kama attacked him, making Kama bodiless.”⁵⁸ An inscription of 474 CE refers to the burning of Kama by Shiva,⁵⁹ so the story must have been fairly well known by then; Kalidasa tells the story in his poem The Birth of the Prince. Here is a slightly fuller Puranic version of the episode:

PARVATI WINS SHIVA

Parvati wished to marry Shiva. She went to Shiva’s hermitage and served him in silence; meditating with his eyes shut, he did not notice her. After some time, Indra sent Kama to inspire Shiva with desire for Parvati; Kama shot an arrow at Shiva, and the moment it struck him, Shiva opened his eyes, noticed Parvati, and was ever so slightly aroused. But then he looked farther and saw Kama, his bow stretched for a second shot. Shiva opened his third eye, releasing a flame that burned with the power of his accumulated ascetic heat, and burned Kama to ashes. (Kama continued to function, more effective than ever, dispersed into moonlight and the heady smell of night-blooming flowers; his bow became reincarnate in the arched eyebrows of beautiful women, his arrows in their glances). Shiva then returned to his meditation.

Parvati engaged in fierce asceticism to win Shiva for her husband, fasting, enduring snows in winter, blazing sun in summer. Shiva appeared before her disguised as a brahma-charin and tested her by describing all those qualities of Shiva that made him an unlikely suitor, including his antipathy to Kama. When Parvati remained steadfast in her devotion to Shiva, the god revealed himself and asked her to marry him. After the wedding, Kama’s widow begged Shiva to revive her husband, and he did so, just in time for the honeymoon.⁶⁰

Himalaya, who is regarded as the source of priceless gems, a king of mountains, disdains Shiva as Daksha had done (though for different reasons), and their fears turn out to be well founded. Shiva is a strange god, the epitome of the sort of person a man would not want his daughter to marry: He is a yogi who has vowed never to marry, he has a third eye in the middle of his forehead, he wanders around naked or wearing nothing but a loincloth woven of living snakes, he has no family, and he lives not in a house but in a cremation ground, smearing his body with the ashes of corpses. It is therefore not surprising that both his potential fathers-in-law object strenuously to him. In one Puranic version of the story, Shiva in disguise tells Parvati’s father, Himalaya: “Shiva is an old man, free from passion, a wanderer and a beggar, not at all suitable for Parvati to marry. Ask your wife and your relatives—ask anyone but Parvati.”⁶¹ The litany of undesirable qualities is a variant of the genre of “worship by insult” that is both a Tamil and a Sanskrit specialty, and that appears in its darker aspect when Daksha curses Shiva and then worships him for the same qualities for which he had cursed him. Redolent of virility and transgression, Shiva’s qualities cast their dark erotic spell on Parvati, as on his worshipers.

The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is celebrated in texts and in ritual hierogamies performed in temples and depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout India. Their marriage is a model of conjugal love, the divine prototype of human marriage, sanctifying the forces that carry on the human race. The marriages of other gods and goddesses too, often local couples celebrated only in one village, constitute a popular theme in temple art and literature, both courtly and vernacular. As in South India, the divine couple often served as a template for the images of kings and their queens who commissioned sculptures depicting, on one level, the god and his goddess, and on another, the king and his consort, or the queen and her consort.

The conflict between Shiva and Kama is only on the surface a conflict between opposites, between an antierotic ascetic power and an antiascetic erotic power. They are two sides of the same coin, two forms of heat, ascetic heat (tapas) and erotic heat (kama).⁶²For it is through his tapas that Shiva generates the power that he will use first for his perpetual tumescence and then to produce the seed of a spectacular child. Some variants of the myth express the connection between Kama and tapas through an additional episode that brings into this myth a figure that we have encountered before:

THE SUBMARINE MARE

Kama deluded Shiva, arousing him, and when Shiva realized this, he released a fire from his third eye, burning Kama to ashes. But the fire could not return to Shiva, and so when Shiva vanished, the fire began to burn all the gods and the universe. Brahma made the fire into a mare with flames coming out of her mouth. He took her to the ocean and said, “This is the fire of Shiva’s anger, which burned Kama and now wants to burn up the entire universe. You must bear it until the final deluge, at which time I will come here and lead it away from you.” The ocean agreed to this, and the fire entered the ocean and was held in check.⁶³

The fire is not just made of Shiva’s anger; it gained special power when it burned Kama, for it absorbed the heat of Kama too. The two fires released by Shiva and Kama meet and produce a fiery weapon of mass destruction that maintains a hair-trigger balance of mutual sublimation. (TheMahabharata says that Shiva himself is the mouth of the submarine mare, eating the waters [13.17.54].) But what is repressed must return, and the strain of tapas in the tradition is always poised to burst through in any monolithic construction of kama, just as kama constantly strains to burst out of extreme tapas. The three elements—Shiva’s anger, Kama’s passion, and the mare—are combined in a verse that Dushyanta, madly in love with Shakuntala, addresses to Kama, the verse cited at the start of this chapter. The balanced extremes implicit in this image are also evident from a Sanskrit aphorism about the two excesses (fire and flood) as well as one of the four addictive vices of lust: A king, no matter how physically powerful, should not drink too much, for the mare fire herself was rendered powerless to burn even a blade of grass, because she drank too much.⁶⁴

PARVATI’S CHILDREN

The most serious problem in the marriage of Shiva and Parvati is the lack of any children born of both parents, a lack that is explicitly regarded as problematic by the gods on some occasions and by Parvati on others, but never by Shiva, who, despite his marriage, remains adamantly opposed to having children. Skanda, as we have seen, is born of Shiva alone, an event that triggers Parvati’s resentful curse that all the wives of the gods should be barren too. The widespread patriarchal belief that all goddesses are mother goddesses is contradicted by Parvati’s curse, as well as by Hindu mythology as a whole. In defiance of her own curse, Parvati in several texts begs Shiva to give her a child, but he never relents. She does want to be a mother; it is Shiva, and the gods, who keep her from being one. The closest she comes to motherhood is with Ganesha.

Many different stories are told about the birth of Ganesha, but one of the best known begins with Parvati taking a bath and longing for someone to keep Shiva from barging in on her, as was his habit. (This is yet another example of the ritus interruptus, the interruption of a sleeping, meditating, or conferring god or king or of an amorous couple or a bathing woman or goddess.) As she bathes, she kneads the dirt that she rubs off her body into the shape of a child, who comes to life. When Shiva sees the handsome young boy (or when the inauspicious planet Saturn glances at it, in some variants that attempt to absolve Shiva of the inverted Oedipal crime), the child’s head falls off; it is eventually replaced with the head of an elephant, sometimes losing part of one tusk along the way.⁶⁵ Thus, just as Skanda is the child of Shiva alone, Ganesha is the child of Parvati alone—indeed a child born despite Shiva’s negative intervention at several crucial moments. Ganesha’s name means “Lord of the Common People” (gana meaning the “common people”) or “Lord of the Troops” (the ganas being the goblin hosts of Shiva, of whom Ganesha is the leader). He is the god of beginnings, always worshiped before any major enterprise, and the patron of intellectuals, scribes, and authors.

Parvati’s problematic relationship with her son Viraka (“Little Hero”), usually equated with Skanda, is narrated in several Puranas, of which the earliest is the Matsya Purana, dated to the Gupta age, though this passage may be later and is reproduced, with variations, in the still later Padma andSkanda Puranas:

THE SPLITTING OF GAURI AND THE GODDESS KALI

One day the god Shiva teased his wife, the goddess Parvati, about her dark skin; he called her “Blackie” [Kali] and said that her dark body against his white body was like a black snake coiled around a pale sandalwood tree. When she responded angrily, they began to argue and to hurl insults at each other. Furious, she went away to generate inner heat in order to obtain a fair, golden skin. Her little son Viraka, stammering in his tears, begged to come with her, but she said to him, “This god chases women when I am not here, and so you must constantly guard his door and peep through the keyhole, so that no other woman gets to him.”

While she was gone, an antigod named Adi took advantage of her absence to attempt to kill Shiva. He took the illusory form of Parvati and entered Shiva’s bedroom, but Shiva, realizing that this was not Parvati but an antigod’s magic power of illusion, killed Adi. When the goddess of the wind told Parvati that Shiva had been with another woman, Parvati became furious; in her tortured mind she pictured her son and said, “Since you abandoned me, your mother who loves you so, and gave women an opportunity to be alone with Shiva, you will be born among humans to a mother who is a heartless, hard, numb, cold stone.” Her anger came out of her body in the form of a lion, with a huge tongue lolling out of a mouth full of sharp teeth. Then the god Brahma came to her and granted her wish to have a golden body and to become half of Shiva’s body, in the form of the androgyne. She sloughed off from her body a dark woman, named the goddess Kali, who went away to live in the Vindhya Mountains, riding on the lion.

Parvati, now in her golden skin [Gauri, “The Fair” or “The Golden”], went home, but her son Viraka, who did not recognize her, stopped her at the door, saying, “Go away! An antigod in the form of the Goddess entered here unseen in order to deceive the god, who killed him and scolded me. So you cannot enter here. The only one who can enter here is my mother, Parvati, who loves her son dearly.” When the Goddess heard this, she thought to herself, “It wasn’t a woman; it was an antigod. I cursed my son wrongly, when I was angry.” She lowered her head in shame and said to her son, “Viraka, I am your mother; do not be confused or misled by my skin; Brahma made me golden. I cursed you when I did not know what had happened. I cannot turn back my curse, but I will say that you will quickly emerge from your human life, with all your desires fulfilled.” The Goddess then returned to Shiva, and they made love together for many years.⁶⁶

The goddess Parvati sloughs her black outer sheath (the goddess Kali, often called Kaushika [“the Sheath”]) to reveal her golden inner form (Gauri). (This act of splitting apart reverses the act of coming together that creates the South India goddess from the head of one woman and the body of another.) In the end the golden Gauri, goddess of the breast, has the son, and the dark goddess Kali, very much a tooth goddess, has the toothy lion.

But the original Parvati, who contains both of the other two goddesses in her in nuce, is already a cruel mother. Not only does she ignore her son’s pitiful pleas as she goes away, abandoning him, but she even throws his words back in his face when she curses him, accusing him of abandoningher by failing to restrain his father’s sexuality. Viraka fails to recognize her when she returns, mistaking her for a non-Parvati (just as his father had mistaken the antigod for Parvati); his failure to recognize her seems to be superficial—she has changed the color of her skin—but it has deeper, darker overtones, for he believes his mother loves him, and this woman has cursed him (though he does not yet know it); indeed she has cursed him to have (another) unloving mother. The peeled-off goddess Kali is banished to the liminal area of the Vindhya Mountains (the southern region that composers of ancient Sanskrit texts in the north of India regarded as beyond the Hindu pale, the place to dump things that you did not want in the story anymore), and so she is called Vindhya-vasini (“She Who Lives in the Vindhyas”). (The myth may be reversing the historical process, for the goddess Kali may have come from the Vindhyas, or from the south in general, into Sanskrit culture.) The remaining golden form, the one that counteracted her son’s curse, becomes the female half of the androgyne.

Though Shiva and Parvati are depicted in both sculpture and painting together with Skanda or Ganesha or both, clearly this is not a Leave It to Beaver type of family: Each member is really a separate individual, with a separate prehistory and a separate role in Hindu worship. Nor are they joined together as members of a family usually are: Parvati does not bear the two children that are depicted with her, nor does Shiva father them in the normal way. The family represents, rather, the forces of the universe that humans must sometimes contend with, sometimes call on for help, though they are often clustered together in a group that presents the form, if not the function, of a family. The family is a way of grouping them together in an image that is “with qualities” (sa-guna), in this case, the qualities of a human family, while in their more commonly worshiped forms, they are not a family at all.

ANIMALS

VEHICLES

Many Shaiva family portraits include the pets. Skanda has his peacock, Ganesha his bandicoot, Shiva his bull, and Parvati her lion. For this is another way, in addition to full-life avatars and periodic theophanies, in which the Hindu gods become present in our world. Most gods and goddesses (apart from the animal, or animal from the waist or neck down, or animal from the waist or neck up forms of the deities) are accompanied by a vehicle (vahana), an animal that serves the deity as a mount. In contrast with the Vedic gods who rode on animals you could ride on (Surya driving his fiery chariot horses, Indra on his elephant Airavata or driving his bay horses), the sectarian Hindu gods sit cross-legged on their animals or ride sidesaddle, with the animals under them presented in profile and the gods full face. Sometimes the animal merely stands beside the deity, both of them stationary.

The Vedic Indra also rode on the Garuda bird, which later became the mount of Vishnu. Garuda is sometimes represented as an eagle from the waist down or the neck up, otherwise anthropomorphic. Some South Indian Vishnu temples have a special landing post for Garuda to alight upon. Shiva’s vehicle is the bull Nandi, a symbol of Shiva’s masculine power and sexuality; the bull expresses something of the god’s own nature as well as his ambivalent relationship to that nature: As the greatest of all ascetics and yogis, Shiva “rides” his own virility in the sense that he controls, harnesses, and tames it. We have met Chandika’s lion, and the goddess Kali’s lion or tiger (which she sometimes lends to Parvati too). Skanda’s vehicle is the peacock, a brilliant choice that needs no explanation for anyone who has ever seen a general in full ceremonial dress, medals and all.

Even some of the half-animal deities have their own entirely animal vehicles: Ganesha’s vehicle is an Indian bandicoot or bandicoot rat, a large (six-pound) rodent (the name is derived from the Telugu word for “pig-rat,” pandhikoku), chosen for Ganesha not because elephants (or even elephant-headed, potbellied, anthropomorphic gods like Ganesha) are likely to canter about on rats, however big, but because rats, like elephants, can get through anything to get what they want, and Ganesha is the remover of obstacles. The bandicoot shares Ganesha’s nimbleness of wit, as well as his path-clearing abilities. The rat has now more recently become a mouse, with intellectual pretensions appropriate to Ganesha; there are modern representations of Ganesha in front of a computer with his bandicoot serving as the mouse.⁶⁷

Images of animals are very old indeed in India, as we saw in the Indus Valley, but they may have become newly attractive in the Gupta period because of the need to produce visual representation of icons and emblems to distinguish different gods under sectarianism. The vahana is also a vehicle in the sense that a particular drama is sometimes said to be the perfect vehicle for a particular actor, or in the sense of (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) “a material embodiment or manifestation, of something.” Or perhaps it is a vehicle in the sense that mosquitoes may “carry” malaria. Wherever the animal is found, the deity is also present. Thus the animals carry the gods into our world as a breeze “carries” perfume. This may be seen as a more particularized expression of the basic Hindu philosophy that the ultimate principle of reality (brahman) is present within the soul of every living creature (atman).

HORSE SACRIFICES

In the horse sacrifice, as we have seen in the ancient texts as well as in the Mahabharata, the chief queen pantomimed copulation with the slaughtered stallion, which was said to be both the sacrificing king (to whom he transferred his powers) and a god, usually Prajapati or Indra. Indra is one of several gods designated as the recipients of the horse sacrifice, but he himself not only sacrifices (as the Vedic gods did, in “Poem of the Primeval Man”) but is unique in that as a king (albeit of the gods), he is famed for having performed more horse sacrifices than anyone else and is jealous of this world’s record (a jealousy that made him steal the hundredth horse of Sagara, whose sons dug out the ocean searching for it). Indra thus (unlike the usual human worshiper, who may combine the roles of sacrificer and victim) normally combines the roles of sacrificer and recipient. That paradox came to the attention of the author of this medieval commentary on the Ramayana: “There are two kinds of gods, those who are gods by birth and those who have more recently become gods by means of karma, such as Indra. The gods by birth receive sacrifice but cannot offer sacrifice; the karma gods, like Indra, perform sacrifice and pose obstacles to sacrificers.”⁶⁸ The higher gods include not only the rest of the Vedic gods but the newer gods, the bhakti gods.

In the Harivamsha (“The Dynasty of Vishnu”), an appendix to the Mahabharata that functions much like a Purana, Indra combines all three roles: sacrificer, recipient, and victim:

JANAMEJAYA’S HORSE SACRIFICE

Janamejaya was consecrated for the sacrifice, and his queen approached the designated stallion and lay down beside him, according to the rules of the ritual. But Indra saw the woman, whose limbs were flawless, and desired her. He himself entered the designated stallion and mingled with the queen. And when this transformation had taken place, Indra said to the priest in charge of the sacrifice, “This is not the horse you designated. Scram.”

The priest, who understood the matter, told the king what Indra had done, and the king cursed Indra, saying, “From today, Kshatriyas will no longer offer the horse sacrifice to this king of the gods, who is fickle and cannot control his senses.” And he fired the priests and banished the queen. But then the king of the Gandharvas calmed him down by explaining that Indra had wanted to obstruct the sacrifice because he was afraid that the king would surpass him with the merits obtained from it. To this end, Indra had seized upon an opportunity when he saw the designated horse and had entered the horse. But the woman with whom he had made love in that way was actually a celestial nymph; Indra had used his special magic to make the king think that it was the queen, his wife. The king of the Gandharvas persuaded the king that this was what had happened.⁶⁹

Like his snake sacrifice, Janamejaya’s horse sacrifice is interrupted. The Arthashastra (1.6.6) remarks that Janamejaya used violence against Brahmins and perished, and a commentator on that text adds that Janamejaya whipped the Brahmins because he suspected them of having violated his queen, though in reality it was Indra who had done it.⁷⁰ At the start of this episode, Janamejaya defies Indra implicitly simply by doing the extravagant sacrifice at all, making him the object of the god’s jealousy.⁷¹ At the end, he defies Indra explicitly, by excluding him from the sacrifice because the god has spoiled it.

This story of Janamejaya, which ends with an exclusion of the deity and a refusal to worship him (reflecting the historical fact that Indra, a Vedic god, was not worshiped any longer in the Puranic period), is thus in many ways an inversion of the story of Daksha, which begins with the exclusion of the god Shiva and ends with the promise that Daksha will in fact sacrifice to Shiva, after Shiva has both spoiled and accomplished the sacrifice (reflecting the historical fact that Shiva, a non-Vedic god, was not worshiped until the Puranic period). This inversion was made possible in part because Indra, the god of conventional Vedic religion, the most orthodox of gods, is in many ways the opposite of Shiva, the unconventional outsider.⁷²

In the epilogue to the story of Indra and Janamejaya’s queen, the king is persuaded (by an appropriately equine figure, a Gandharva, a kind of centaur) that it all was an illusion. This is a common device used to undo what has been done in a myth, as is the device of the magical double that conveniently replaces a woman in sexual danger. (Or who is said to have replaced her; is the Gandharva telling the truth?) Here it also recapitulates precisely what the central episode of the myth has just done: It has revealed the illusion implicit in the sacrifice, the illusion that the sacrificial horse is the god Indra and not merely a horse. The horse sacrifice is similarly demystified and satirized in a twelfth-century text in which Kali, the incarnate spirit of the Kali Age, watches the coupling of the sacrificer’s wife with the horse of the horse sacrifice and announces, being no pandit, that the person who made the Vedas was a buffoon,⁷³ which is to say that Kali takes it literally and misses its symbolism. As the cachet of the horse sacrifice and of animal sacrifices in general fell during this period (as satires like this suggest), kings often endowed temples instead of sacrificing horses⁷⁴—sacrificial substitution in a new key.

RESTORING THE MAHABHARATA

Puranic rituals often replaced Vedic rituals. We have noted how Vedic rituals were devised to mend the broken parts of human life. Puranic rituals are devised for this too but also to cure the ills of previous ages and, indeed, of previous texts. Though many Puranas offer their hearers/readers Release, most of them are devoted to the more worldly goals of the path of rebirth, and the end of the line is not absorption into brahman but an eternity in the heaven of the sectarian god to whom the Purana is devoted. Moksha is ineffable, but the texts often describe the bhakti heaven.

The Puranas return to the moral impasses of the Mahabharata, some of which were resolved only by the illusion ex machina, and offer new solutions that were not available to the authors of that text. Yudhishthira’s dilemma in hell was occasioned by a kind of transfer of merit: Yudhishthira sent a cool breeze to ease the torment of his brothers and Draupadi, as well as a few other relatives. That concept, merely sketched there, is more fully developed a few centuries later in the Markandeya Purana:

MERIT TRANSFER IN HELL

Once, when his wife named Fatso [Pivari] had been in her fertile season, King Vipashchit did not sleep with her, as it was his duty to do, but slept instead with his other, beautiful wife, Kaikeyi. He went to hell briefly to expiate this one sin, but when he was about to leave for heaven, the people in hell begged him to stay, since the wind that touched his body dispelled their pain. “People cannot obtain in heaven or in the world of Brahma,” said Vipashchit, “such happiness as arises from giving release [nirvana] to suffering creatures.” And he refused to leave until Indra agreed to let the king’s good deeds [karma] be used to release those people of evil karma from their torments in hell—though they all went from there immediately to another womb that was determined by the fruits of their own karma (14.1-7, 15.47-80).

The episode is clearly based on the Mahabharata, and uses some of the same phrases. (It also gives the sexually preferred second wife in this story the name of the sexually preferred second wife in the Ramayana, Kaikeyi.) But significantly, the people in hell now are not related to the king in any way; his compassion extends to all creatures. Now also the text begins to speak of Buddhist/Hindu concepts like nirvana and the transfer of karma, making it possible for the real, heaven-bound king to release real sinners from a real hell. Karma and samsara have the last word, though: In the end, having passed through heaven and hell, the sinners are reborn according to their just deserts, a theory that the final chapter of the Mahabharata had chosen not to invoke.

The Puranas expand upon the basic Mahabharata concept of the time-sharing aspects of heaven and hell, adding psychological details:

Sometimes a man goes to heaven; sometimes he goes to hell. Sometimes a dead man experiences both hell and heaven. Sometimes he is born here again and consumes his own karma; sometimes a man who has consumed his karma dies and goes forth with just a very little bit of karma remaining. Sometimes he is reborn here with a small amount of good and bad karma, having consumed most of his karma in heaven or in hell. A great source of the suffering in hell is the fact that the people there can see the people who dwell in heaven; but the people in hell rejoice when the people in heaven fall down into hell. Likewise, there is great misery even in heaven, beginning from the very moment when people ascend there, for this thought enters their minds: “I am going to fall from here.” And when they see hell they become quite miserable, worrying, day and night, “This is where I am going to go.”⁷⁵

The misery of hell is thus somewhat alleviated by schadenfreude, and the pleasures of heaven are undercut by the attitude of Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who cries, “Ouch!” before she pricks her finger. ⁷⁶

The sins that send you to hell and the virtues that send you to heaven are often described in detail that rivals that of the shastras, as the texts seem to vie with one another in imagining gruesome and appropriate punishments to fit the crime. After hearing the spine-curdling descriptions of the tortures of hell, the interlocutor (who is, as in the Mahabharata, built into the frame) often asks: “Isn’t there anything that I can do to avoid having that happen to me?” And yes, you will be happy to hear that there is: just as there was a Vedic ritual to protect you, now there is a Puranic ritual, or a Puranic mantra, or a Puranic shrine, or a Puranic pilgrimage, that the text mercifully teaches you right then and there. There are many pilgrimage sites described in the Mahabharata, particularly in the great tour of the fords (tirthas); but now each Purana plugs one special place.

For the moral dilemma posed by the massacre in the Mahabharata, the Puranic solution is a pilgrimage to Prayaga (Allahabad), the junction of the two sacred rivers (the Ganges and the Yamuna), above Varanasi, the site of the greatest annual festival in India, the Kumbha Mela:

AN EXPIATION FOR THE MAHABHARATA WAR

When King Yudhishthira and his brothers had killed all the Kauravas, he was overwhelmed by a great sorrow and became bewildered. Soon afterward, the great ascetic Markandeya arrived at the city of Hastinapur. Yudhishthira bowed to the great sage and said, “Tell me briefly how I may be released from my sins. Many men who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and the Kauravas. Please tell me how one may be released from the mortal sin that results from acts of violence against living creatures, even if it was done in a former life.”

Markandeya said, “Listen, your majesty, to the answer to your question: Going to Prayaga is the best way for men to destroy evil. The god Rudra, the Great God, lives there, as does the self-created lord Brahma, together with the other gods.” Yudhishthira said, “Sir, I wish to hear the fruit of going to Prayaga. Where do people who die there go, and what is the fruit of bathing there?”⁷⁷

And the sage obliges him, in considerable detail.

Yudhishthira is haunted by the same problem that troubled Arjuna centuries earlier in the Gita: “Many men who had committed no offense were killed in the battle between us and the Kauravas.” In the Mahabharata, Yudhishthira performed a horse sacrifice to restore himself and the kingdom; in the Puranas, he makes a pilgrimage to Prayaga. The format of this myth—first a statement of a sin (the mess I got myself into), then the promise of a restoration, a solution—is a set piece, new Puranic wine poured into old Brahmana bottles.

The Puranas tackle other Mahabharata trouble spots too. In the Mahabharata, Balarama is the brother of Krishna, renowned for his physical power and his prowess with the mace. In the Vaishnava Puranas, Balarama becomes far more important and is sometimes regarded as one of the avatars of Vishnu. But he is also a notorious drinker, and the Puranas tell a striking story about this:

A RESTORATION FOR DRUNKENNESS AND MANSLAUGHTER

One day Balarama, the brother of Krishna, got drunk and wandered around, stumbling, his eyes red with drinking. He came to a forest where a group of learned Brahmins were listening to a bard, a Charioteer, reciting stories in the place of a Brahmin. When the Brahmins saw Balarama and realized that he was drunk, they all stood up quickly, all except for the Charioteer. Enraged, Balarama struck the Charioteer and killed him. Then all the Brahmins left the forest, and when Balarama saw how they shunned him and sensed that his body had a disgusting smell, the smell of bloodshed, he realized that he had committed Brahminicide. He cursed his rage, and the wine, and his arrogance, and his cruelty. For restoration, he undertook a twelve-year pilgrimage to the Sarasvati River “against the current,” confessing his crime.⁷⁸

Since the Charioteer belongs to a low caste that is said to go “against the current”⁷⁹ (born from a father of a caste lower than the mother’s), Balarama undertakes the appropriate pilgrimage “against the current”—that is, from the mouth to the source of the Sarasvati River. (Balarama is famous for having altered the course of the Yamuna/Kalindi River.⁸⁰) Yet he understands that he has killed someone who is in some way the equivalent of a Brahmin, not in his caste but perhaps in his knowledge and in his status in the eyes of actual Brahmins, so that in killing him he has committed Brahminicide, and he accuses himself of arrogance for expecting the Charioteer to rise in deference to him. The pilgrimage and confession are his ways of dealing with what he acknowledges as his rage and cruelty, though he curses the wine rather than his own addictive drunkenness. In the Puranas, there is a cure for everything.