CHAPTER 2
THE BIRTH OF INDIA
The Ganges, though flowing from the foot of Vishnu and through
Siva’s hair, is not an ancient stream. Geology, looking further than
religion, knows of a time when neither the river nor the Himalayas
that nourished it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of
Hindustan. The mountains rose, their debris silted up the ocean, the
gods took their seats on them and contrived the river, and the India
we call immemorial came into being.
—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)1
TIME
ORIGINS: OUT OF AFRICA
To begin at the beginning:
Once upon a time, about 50 million years ago,ag a triangular plate of land, moving fast (for a continent), broke off from Madagascar (a large island lying off the southeastern coast of Africa) and, “adrift on the earth’s mantle,”2 sailed across the Indian Ocean and smashed into the belly of Central Asia with such force that it squeezed the earth five miles up into the skies to form the Himalayan range and fused with Central Asia to become the Indian subcontinent.3 Or so the people who study plate tectonics nowadays tell us, and who am I to challenge them?ah Not just land but people came to India from Africa, much later; the winds that bring the monsoon rains to India each year also brought the first humans to peninsular India by sea from East Africa in around 50,000 BCE.4 And so from the very start India was a place made up of land and people from somewhere else. So much for “immemorial.” Even the ancient “Aryans” probably came, ultimately,5 from Africa. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.
This prehistoric episode will serve us simultaneously as a metaphor for the way that Hinduism through the ages constantly absorbed immigrant people and ideas and as the first historical instance of such an actual immigration. (It can also be read as an unconscious satire on histories that insist on tracing everything back to ultimate origins, as can the E. M. Forster passage cited at the start.) The narratives that Hindus have constructed about that stage and those actors, narratives about space and time, form the main substance of this chapter. The flood myth, in particular, is about both space (continents sinking) and time (periodic floods marking the aeons). Often unexpressed, always assumed, these narratives are the structures on which all other narratives about history are built. We will then briefly explore the natural features of India—rivers and mountains—that serve not only as the stage on which the drama of history unfolds but as several of the main actors in that drama, for Ganga (the Ganges) and Himalaya appear in the narratives as the wife and father-in-law of the god Shiva, respectively.
GONDWANALAND AND LEMURIA
Francis Bacon was the first to notice, from maps of Africa and the New World first available in 1620, that the coastlines of western Africa and eastern South America matched rather neatly. Scientists in the nineteenth century hypothesized that Antarctica, Australia, Africa, Madagascar, South America, Arabia, and India all were connected in the form of a single vast supercontinent to which an Austrian geologist gave the name of Gondwana or Gondwanaland. (He named it after the region of central India called Gondwana—which means “the forest of the Gonds,” the Gonds being tribal people of central India—comprising portions of the present states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh,6 the latter a region famous for its enormous rocks, the oldest on the planet.) Scientists then suggested that what were later called continental shiftsai began about 167 million years ago (in the mid- to late Jurassic period), causing the eastern part of the continent of Gondwana to separate from Africa and, after a while (about 120 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period), to move northward. It broke into two pieces. One piece was Madagascar, and the other was the microcontinent that eventually erupted into the Deccan plateau and crashed into Central Asia.aj Australian Indologists joke that the Deccan is really part of Australia.7
The Gondwanaland story takes us to the farthest limit, the reduction to the absurd, of the many searches for origins that have plagued the historiography of India from the beginning (there, I’m doing it myself, searching for the origins of the myth of origins). Both nineteenth-century scholarship and twenty-first-century politics have taken a preternatural interest in origins. Nineteenth-century scholars who searched for the ur-text (the “original text,” as German scholarship defined it), the ur-ruins, the ur-language carried political stings in their tales: “We got there first,” “It’s ours” (ignoring the history of all the intervening centuries that followed and other legitimate claims). They viewed the moment of origins as if there were a kind of magic Rosetta stone, with the past on one side and the present on the other, enabling them to do a simple one-to-one translation from the past into the present ever after. But even if they could know the ur-past, and they could not (both because logically there is no ultimate beginning for any chain of events and because the data for the earliest periods are at best incomplete and at worst entirely inaccessible), it would hardly provide a charter for the present.
Other scientists in the colonial period agreed about the ancient supercontinent but imagined its disintegration as taking place in the opposite way, not when land (proto-India) broke off from land (Australia/Africa) and moved through water (the Indian Ocean) to join up with other land (Central Asia), but rather when water (the Indian Ocean) moved in over land (a stationary supercontinent like Gondwanaland) that was henceforth lost under the waves, like Atlantis. According to this story, water eventually submerged (under what is now called the Indian Ocean) the land that had extended from the present Australia through Madagascar to the present South India.
In 1864 a geologist named that supercontinent Lemuria, because he used the theory to account for the fact that living lemurs were found, in the nineteenth century, only in Madagascar and the surrounding islands, and fossil lemurs were found from Pakistan to Malaya, but no lemurs, living or dead, were found in Africa or the Middle East (areas that would never have been connected to Lemuria as Madagascar and Pakistan presumably once were).8 Animals, as usual, here define human boundaries, and the myths about those boundaries, as usual, proliferated. In 1876, Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist of a Darwinian persuasion, published his History of Creation, claiming that the lost continent of Lemuria was the cradle of humankind; in 1885 a British historian argued that the Dravidian languages had been brought to India when the ancestors of the Dravidians came from Lemuria;9 in 1886 a teenager in California “channeled” voices that suggested that the survivors of Lemuria were living in tunnels under Mount Shasta in California;10and in 1888, in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky claimed that certain Indian holy men had shown her a secret book about Lemuria.
This myth nurtured among the colonial powers was then taken up, in the 1890s, by Tamil speakers on the southern tip of South India, who began to regard Lemuria as a lost ancestral home from which they all were exiled in India or to argue that the extant India, or Tamil Nadu, or just the southernmost tip of India, Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin), was all that was left of Lemuria; or that when Lemuria sank, Tamilians dispersed to found the civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Americas, Europe, and, in particular, the Indus Valley.11 Nowadays some Tamil separatists want to reverse the process, to detach Tamil Nadu from the rest of India, not, presumably, physically, to float back over the Indian Ocean like Gondwanaland in reverse, but politically, in order to recapture the glory of their lost Lemurian past.
The passage from E. M. Forster cited above, “The Birth of India,” begins with the Himalayas rising up out of the ocean, Gondwanaland fashion, but then, as it continues, it slips into the other variant, the story of the submersion of Lemuria, and regards that submersion as preceding the Gondwanaland episode, pushing back the origins even farther: “But India is really far older. In the days of the prehistoric ocean the southern part of the peninsula already existed, and the high places of Dravidia have been land since land began, and have seen on the one side the sinking of a continent that joined them to Africa, and on the other the upheaval of the Himalayas from a sea.”12 Forster concludes his passage with a third aspect of the myth, its periodicity or cyclicity, its prediction that the flooding of South India will happen again and again: “As Himalayan India rose, this India, the primal, has been depressed, and is slowly re-entering the curve of the earth. It may be that in aeons to come an ocean will flow here too, and cover the sun-born rocks with slime.”
So that’s how it all began. Or maybe it didn’t. Forster of course has the carte blanche of a novelist, but even the plate tectonics people may be building sand castles, for the plate tectonics theory is after all a speculation, albeit a scientific speculation based on good evidence.
Whether or not a subcontinent once shook the dust of Africa off its heels and fused onto Asia, the story of Gondwanaland reminds us that even after the Vedic people had strutted around the Ganges Valley for a few centuries, all they had done was add a bit more to what was already a very rich mix. The multiplicity characteristic of Hinduism results in part from a kind of fusion—a little bit of Ravi Shankar in the night, a Beatle or two—that has been going on for millions of years, as has globalization of a different sort from that which the word generally denotes. The pieces of the great mosaic of Hinduism were put in place, one by one, by the many peoples who bequeathed to India something of themselves, planting a little piece of England, or Samarkand, or Africa, in the Punjab or the Deccan.
APRÈS MOI, LE DÉLUGE
Hinduism is so deeply embedded in the land of its birth that we cannot begin to understand its history without understanding something of its geography and in particular the history of representations of its geography. The central trope for both time and space in India is the great flood. The myth of the flood is told and retold in a number of variants, some of which argue for the loss of a great ancient civilization or a fabulous shrine. The telling of a myth of such a flood, building upon a basic story well known throughout India, allows a number of different places to imagine a glorious lost past of which they can still be proud today.
The myth of the flooding of Lemuria, or Dravidia, builds on the traditions of other floods. There is archaeological evidence for the flooding of the Indus Valley cities by the Indus River (c. 2000 BCE), as well as for that of the city of Hastinapura by the Ganges, in about 800 BCE.13 There is also textual evidence (in the Mahabharata) for the flooding of the city of Dvaraka, the city of Krishna, at the westernmost tip of Gujarat, by the Western Ocean (that is, the Arabian Sea),14 in around 950 BCE. (Sources differ; some say 3102 or 1400 BCE.)15 The appendix to the Mahabharata also tells of the emergence of Dvaraka from the ocean in the first place. When Krishna chose Dvaraka as the site for his city, he asked the ocean to withdraw from the shore for twelve leagues to give space for the city; the ocean complied.16 Since the sea had yielded the land, against nature (like the Netherlands), it would be only fair for it to reclaim it again in the end. Later texts tell of a different sort of bargain: Krishna in a dream told a king to build a temple to him as Jagannatha in Puri, but the ocean kept sweeping the temple away. The great saint Kabir stopped the ocean, which took the form of a Brahmin and asked Kabir for permission to destroy the temple; Kabir refused but let him destroy the temple at Dvaraka in Gujarat. And so he did.17 Even so, some texts insist that the temple of Krishna in Dvaraka was not flooded; the sea was not able to cover it, “even to the present day,”18 and the temple, able to wash away all evils, remains there,19 just as in the periodic flooding of the universe of doomsday, something always survives. (The physical location of the shrine of Dvaraka, at the very westernmost shore of India, where the sun dies every evening, may have inspired the idea that the town was the sacred gate to the world of the dead.20) In direct contradiction of the Mahabharata’s statement that the entire city was destroyed, these later texts insist that it is still there. Dvaraka is said to exist today in Gujarat, and archaeologists and divers have published reports on what they claim to be its remains.21
We may also see here the patterns of the myths of both Lemuria (the ocean submerging Dvaraka) and Gondwana (Dvaraka emerging from the ocean to join onto Gujarat). Other myths too follow in the wake of this one, such as the story that the ocean (calledsagara) was first formed when the sixty thousand sons of a king named Sagara dug into the earth to find the lost sacrificial horse of their father, who was performing a horse sacrifice.22 (Some versions say that Indra, the king of the gods, stole the horse.)23 A sage burned the princes to ashes, and years later Bhagiratha, the great-grandson of Sagara, persuaded the Ganges, which existed at that time only in the form of the Milky Way in heaven, to descend to earth in order to flow over the ashes of his grandfathers and thus purify them so that they could enter heaven; he also persuaded the god Shiva to let the heavenly Ganges River land first on his head and meander through his matted hair before flowing down to the earth, in order to prevent her from shattering the earth by a direct fall out of the sky.24 According to another text, when Sagara performed the horse sacrifice, the oceans began to overflow and cover all the land with water. The gods asked the great ascetic Parashurama to intercede; he appealed to Varuna (the Vedic god of the waters), who threw the sacrificial vessel far away, causing the waters to recede and thereby creating the western kingdom of Shurparaka.25 (In a different subtext of this version, when Parashurama was banished from the earth and needed land to live on, Varuna told him to throw his ax as far into the ocean as he could; the water receded up to Gokarna, the place where his ax finally fell, thus creating the land of Kerala.26)
There are other legends of submerged cities or submerged lands or land-masses. ak27 The cities where the first two assemblies that created Tamil literature were held are said to have been destroyed by the sea.28 In the seventeenth century, people claimed to be able still to see the tops of a submerged city, temples and all, off the coast of Calicut.29 For centuries there were said to be seven pagodas submerged off the coast of Mamallipuram, near Madras, and on December 26, 2004, when the great tsunami struck, as the waves first receded about five hundred meters into the sea, Frontline (an Indian news Web site) reported that tourists saw a row of rocks on the north side of the Shore Temple and that behind the Shore Temple in the east, architectural remains of a temple were revealed. “When the waves subsided, these were submerged in the sea again.”30Archaeologists denied that there could be any submerged temples there.31 Our knowledge of the long history of the imaginative myth of the submerged Hindu temple inclines us to side with the more skeptical archaeologists.
Behind all these traditions may lie the story of another great flood, first recorded in the Shatapatha Brahmana (c. 800 BCE), around the same time as one of the proposed dates for the Mahabharata flood, a myth that has also been linked to Noah’s Ark in Genesis32 as well as to stories of the flood that submerged the Sumerian city of Shuruppak and is described in the Gilgamesh epic. Indeed flood myths are found in most of the mythologies of the world: Africa, the Near East, Australia, South Seas, Scandinavia, the Americas, China, Greece. They are widespread because floods are widespread, especially along the great rivers that nurture early civilizations (and even more widespread in the lands watered by the monsoons). There are significant variants: Some cultures give one reason for the flood, some other reasons, some none; sometimes one person survives, sometimes several, sometimes many (seldom none—or who could tell the story?—though the creator sometimes starts from scratch again); some survive in boats, some by other means.33
In the oldest extant Indian variant, in the Brahmanas, Manu, the first human being, the Indian Adam, finds a tiny fish who asks him to save him from the big fish who will otherwise eat him. This is an early expression of concern about animals being eaten, in this case by other animals; “fish eat fish,” what we call “dog eat dog,” is the Indian term for anarchy. The fish promises, in return for Manu’s help, to save Manu from a great flood that is to come. Manu protects the fish until he is so big that he is “beyond destruction” and then builds a ship (the fish tells him how to do it); the fish pulls the ship to a mountain, and when the floodwaters subside, Manu keeps following them down. The text ends: “The flood swept away all other creatures, and Manu alone remained here.”34 The theme of “helpful animals” who requite human kindness (think of Androcles and the lion) teaches two morals: A good deed is rewarded, and be kind to (perhaps do not eat?) animals.
Centuries later a new element is introduced into the story of the flood, one so important and complex that we must pause for a moment to consider it: the idea that time is both linear and cyclical. The four Ages of time, or Yugas, are a series named after the four throws of the dice. Confusingly, the number of the Age increases as the numbers of the dice, the quality of life, and the length of the Age decrease: The first Age, the Krita Yuga (“Winning Age”) or the Satya Yuga (“Age of Truth”), what the Greeks called the Golden Age (for the four Ages of time, or Yugas, formed a quartet in ancient Greece too), is the winning throw of four, a time of happiness, when humans are virtuous and live for a long time. The second Age, the Treta Yuga (“Age of the Trey”), is the throw of three; things are not quite so perfect. In the third Age, the Dvapara Yuga (“Age of the Deuce”), the throw of two, things fall apart. And the Kali Age is the dice throw of snake eyes, the present Age, the Iron Age, the Losing Age, the time when people are no damn good and die young, and barbarians invade India, the time when all bets are off. This fourth Age was always, from the start, entirely different from the first three in one essential respect: Unlike the other Ages, it is now, it is real. The four Ages are also often analogized to the four legs of dharma visualized as a cow who stands on four legs in the Winning Age, then becomes three-legged, two-legged, and totters on one leg in the Losing Age.
But time in India is not only linear, as in Greece (for the ages steadily decline), but cyclical, unlike Greece (for the end circles back to the beginning again). The cosmos is reborn over and over again, as each successive Kali Age ends in a doomsday fire and a flood that destroys the cosmos but is then transformed into the primeval flood out of which the cosmos is re-created, undergoing a sea change in a new cosmogony.al The idea of circular cosmic time is in part the result of Indian ideas about reincarnation, the circularity of the individual soul. The ending precedes the beginning, but the end and the beginning were always there from the start, before the beginning and after the end, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot.am
In later retellings of the story of the flood, therefore—to return at last to our story—the fish saves Manu from the doomsday flood that comes at the end of the Kali Age, the final dissolution (pralaya):
THE FISH AND THE FLOOD
Manu won from the god Brahma, the creator, the promise that he would be able to protect all creatures, moving and still, when the dissolution took place. One day, he found a little fish and saved it until it grew so big that it terrified him, whereupon he realized that it must be Vishnu. The fish said, “Bravo! You have recognized me. Soon the whole earth will be flooded. The gods have made this boat for you to save the great living souls; bring all the living creatures into the boat, and you will survive the dissolution and be king at the beginning of the Winning Age. At the end of the Kali Age, the mare who lives at the bottom of the ocean will open her mouth and a poisonous fire will burst out of her, coming up out of hell; it will burn the whole universe, gods and constellations and all. And then the seven clouds of doomsday will flood the earth until everything is a single ocean. You alone will survive, together with the sun and moon, several gods, and the great religious texts and sciences.” And so it happened, and the fish came and saved Manu.35
In this text, Manu saves not himself alone but all creatures, and this time the gods, instead of Manu, build the boat. This variant also gives us a much more detailed, and hence more reassuring, image of what is to follow the flood; a new world is born out of the old one. These stories suggest that floods are both inevitable and survivable; this is what happens to the world, yet the world goes on.
More significantly, the myth is now part of the great story of the cycle of time, involving fire as well as water, so that the flood now appears more as a solution than as a problem: It puts out the mare fire that is always on the verge of destroying us. For a mare roams at the bottom of the ocean; the flames that shoot out of her mouth are simultaneously bridled by and bridling the waters of the ocean,36 like uranium undergoing constant fission, controlled by lithium rods. In several of the myths of her origin, the fire is said to result from the combined fires of sexual desire and the fire of the ascetic repression of sexual desire,37 or from the fury of the god Shiva when he is excluded from the sacrifice. 38 The submarine mare is (to continue the nuclear metaphor) like a deadly atomic U-boat cruising the deep, dark waters of the unconscious. It should not go unnoticed that the mare is a female, the symbol of all that threatens male control over the internal fires of restrained passions that are always in danger of breaking out in disastrous ways. This delicate balance, this hair-trigger suspension, is disturbed at the end of the Kali Age, the moment of doomsday, when the mare gallops out of the ocean and sets the world on fire, and the newly unchecked ocean leaves its bed and floods the ashes of the universe, which then lie dormant until the next period of creation.39 And then, like the ashes of Sagara’s sons, the ashes of the entire universe are revived as it is reborn. A remnant or seed, a small group of good people, is saved by a fish (usually identified as one of the several incarnations of the great god Vishnu), who pulls a boat to a mountain, where they survive to repeople the universe.40 (The mountain, the Hindu equivalent of Ararat, is identified with numerous sites throughout India.an) The myth expresses the barely controlled tendency of the universe to autodestruct (and perhaps a kind of prescientific theory of global warming: When it gets hotter, the ice caps will melt, and there will be a flood41).
Recent attempts to excavate both Lemuria and the submerged city of Dvaraka,42 correlated with recent oceanographic work carried out in 1998-99 around the Kerguelen plateau in the southernmost reaches of the Indian Ocean, have rekindled speculations about a “lost continent” in the Indian Ocean. What surprised the excavators most was not the enormous plateau that they found in the middle of the Indian Ocean but signs that “near the end of the plateau growth, there is strong evidence of highly explosive eruptions.”43The volcanic activity of the submarine mare, perhaps?
SPACE
MAPS
So much for origins.
Whatever fused with India had to make its peace with what was already there, its unique climate, fauna, and, eventually, culture. The land and its people transformed all who came to them; they did not simply passively receive the British, or the Mughals before them, let alone the people of the Veda, or that migratory bit of Africa.
Geographical and Mythological Map of India.
Ancient Indian cosmology imagined a flat earth consisting of seven concentric continents, the central one surrounded by the salty ocean and each of the other roughly circular continents surrounded by oceans of other liquids: treacle (molasses), wine, ghee (clarified butter), milk, curds, and freshwater. (This prompted one nineteenth-century Englishman’s notorious tirade against “geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”44) In the center of the central mainland (the “Plum-tree Continent” or Jambu-Dvipa) stands the cosmic mountain Meru, from which four subcontinents radiate out to the east, west, north, and south, like the petals of a lotus; the southernmost petal of this mainland is Bharata-varsha, the ancient Sanskrit name for India. If you bisect the lotus horizontally, you see India as a kite-shaped landmass with mountains in the north and (salt) oceans on all other sides, much as it appears on any Rand McNally map.ao The watery world under the earth, which the cobra people (Nagas) inhabit, is also there, in the water table that we encounter every time we sink a well anywhere in the world.
Cosmography and cartography overlie each other, as do the rabbit and the man in the moon, myth and history. It has been rightly remarked that texts are just maps, and map is not territory;45 but when the maps are big enough, they become territories of their own. There is a shared core underlying both maps and territories, from which myths and political narratives spread out in different directions. There was a flood, and now there is a politically useful myth about it; there is an arrangement of water and land, and there is a politically inspired diagram of it (for different countries draw the borders of Kashmir, to take a case at random, in very different ways). The map of the Plum-tree Continent is to a Rand McNally map as the flood myth is to the geological record. The natural layout of water and land serves as the basis of the myth of a flood and the diagram of the cosmos, which in turn support the construction of a politically useful chart of time and space.
TERRITORY: MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, MONSOON
Many people have imagined the Himalayan Mountains as posing an impregnable barrier, but this image of Inaccessible India is simply a part of the Unchanging India package. India functioned, throughout history, less like Shangri-la than like Heathrow or O’Hare. The Himalayas are indeed high, and no one ever strolled casually across them, but they did not keep people out of India. Alexander the Great managed to get into India over the Himalayan Mountains (probably through the Khyber Pass), horses, mules, camels, and all, and many others followed. Not without reason was the Hindu imagination haunted by the specter of invasion, expressed in the persistent myth of the degenerate Kali Age, a nightmare of barbarian penetration. The physical boundaries of India were as porous as those between its internal belief systems. Silk came from China across the Central Asian silk route (the word for “silk” in Sanskrit is china), and just about everyone in the ancient world—beginning with traders from Mesopotamia, Crete, Rome, and Arabia—washed up sooner or later on some coast of India.
So too the Vindhya Mountains form the barrier between North and South India, but the stories about the Vindhyas tell how that barrier was breached, not how it kept people apart: When the Vindhyas began to grow so tall that even the sun had to go around them (just as it circumambulates Mount Meru), the great sage Agastya asked them to bow their heads before him so that he could cross from North to South India (bringing Sanskrit and the Vedas to the Dravidian lands) and to remain that way until he returned; the Vindhyas agreed to this, and since Agastya never returned from South India, where he established the Tamil language, the Vindhyas remain conveniently low.
In South Asia, history flows with the rivers. Three great river systems divide the northern subcontinent: first the Indus (“the River”) in Pakistan, with its five tributaries, the rivers of the Punjab (Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej) that give the Punjab its name (“Five Waters”); then the Doab or “Two Rivers,” the Ganges (Ganga, “Going to Earth” [from heaven, where she is the Milky Way]) and the Yamuna (“Twin Sister,” now Jumna) in North India; and then the Brahmaputra (“Son of Brahma”) in Bangladesh. All three rivers originate in a single region of southwestern Tibet, their sources so close that they may once have belonged to a single icy lake that was shattered when the piece of Africa that crashed into Central Asia drove off the waters in diverse directions. 46 The Indus flows eighteen hundred miles before it empties into the Arabian sea. The Narmada (“Jester”), the great river that, like the Vindhya Mountains, divides the north from the south, has inspired an extensive mythology that balances that of the Ganges in the north.
What is the relationship between climate and culture in India? Is there some causal link between, on the one hand, “the ambivalent natural environment, where lush harvests coexist with barren soil, drought with flood, feast with famine,” and, on the other, the fact that Hindu logicians were the first to posit the coexistence of the elements of contradiction?47 Other countries have “ambivalent natural environments” too; farmers the world over are at the mercy of the elements. But the violence and uncertainty of the monsoon create an ever-present psychological factor that may well be related to Hindu ideas about the capriciousness and violence of fate and the gods.
CONCLUSION: CON-FUSION
What does the geology of the formation of India tell us about the formation of Hinduism? The answer is suggested by a story that A. K. Ramanujan retold, from Tamil sources:
THE BRAHMIN HEAD AND THE PARIAH BODY
A sage’s wife, Mariamma, was sentenced by her husband to death. At the moment of execution she embraced a Pariah woman, Ellamma, for her sympathy. In the fray both the Pariah woman and the Brahmin lost their heads. Later the husband relented, granted them pardon, and restored their heads by his spiritual powers. But the heads were transposed by mistake. To Mariamma (with a Brahmin head and Pariah body) goats and cocks but not buffalo were sacrificed; to Ellamma (Pariah head and Brahmin body) buffalo instead of goats and cocks.48
This text is itself an example of what it tells about: It mixes together the story of Mariamma from two different Indian geographical and linguistic traditions, North Indian Sanskrit literature, where she is called Renuka, and South Indian Tamil oral folktales about the origins of two South Indian goddesses.49 This sort of juxtaposition, in various forms, is widespread in both myth and history, beginning with the piece of Africa stuck onto Central Asia, like a head upon a body, and continuing through all the ideas of women and low castes that get into the heads of Brahmin males. It can stand as a metaphor for all the fusions that make up the rich mix of Hinduism.
The mixing together of various human streams is so basic to the history of Hinduism that the Brahmins could not stop trying, and failing, to prevent it, even as their fear of the powers of the senses to invade the rational control center made them try, also in vain, to control addiction through asceticism. Their ultimate terror was the “confusion” of classes, the miscegenation brought on by the Kali Age. They visualized the mixing of classes as a form of impurity, which should not surprise anyone who has read the British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s explanation of the ways that throughout the world, “category errors”—things that do not fall entirely into one class or another—are characterized as dirt and as danger.50 Brahmins regarded the woman with the Brahmin head and Pariah body—and her twin and partner, with the Pariah head on the Brahmin body—as monstrosities, a double hodgepodge. But from the standpoint of a non-Brahmin, or a scholar of Hinduism, this rich hybrid or multiple mix is precisely what makes Hinduism the cultural masterpiece that it is.
Such a conflation is not a monstrosity, nor is it a mistake—or if it is, it is a felix culpa. The transpositions result in two goddesses (read: many Hinduisms), each of whom is far more interesting than the straightforward realignment would have been. Whatever its disparate sources, the resulting creature has an integrity that we must respect, rather like that of my favorite mythical beast, created by Woody Allen, the Great Roe, who had the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion.51 The question to ask is not where the disparate elements originated but why they were put together and why kept together. The political implications of regarding Hinduism as either a hodgepodge or, on the other hand, culturally homogeneous or even monolithic are equally distorting; it is always more useful, if a bit trickier, to acknowledge simultaneously the variety of the sources and the power of the integrations. A Hinduism with a Pariah body and a Brahmin head—or, if you prefer, a Pariah head and a Brahmin body—was re-created again and again throughout India history, and these multiple integrities are what this book is about.