The Hindus (14 page)

Much was made of this tiny bit of soapstone (remember, the
whole seal
is barely an inch high); the millimeter of the putative erection on this seal has, like the optional inch of Cleopatra’s nose, caused a great deal of historical fuss. Scholars have connected the “big-nosed gentleman . . . who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals”
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with well-known images of the ithyphallic Shiva.
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The discovery at Indus sites of a number of polished, oblong stones, mostly small but ranging up to two feet in height, and probably used to grind grain, has led some scholars
⁵³
to identify these stones as replicas of the erect phallus (linga) of Shiva and the vagina (yoni) of his consort, and to link these stones with “the later aniconic representations” of Shiva in the form of the linga.
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Other scholars have suggested that “the Vedic criticism of ‘those who worship the phallus’” may refer to this “early Indus cult.”
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There are so many assumptions here that it makes your head spin: that the Indus had a “cult” (a rather pejorative word for a religious sect), that the people of the Veda knew about it, that they disapproved of it instead of assimilating it to their own worship of the phallic Indra—no lawyer would go into court with this sort of evidence.

These all are arguments from hindsight. Marshall identified the figure as Shiva because (1) the Indus figure is seated on a low stool with knees pointed to the sides, feet together at his groin, and arms resting on his knees, a posture that many have identified as yogic (though it is the way that South Asians often sit), and Shiva is the god of yogis; (2) the Indus figure wears a horned headdress (or has horns), perhaps a buffalo mask as well as buffalo horns,
⁵⁶
just as Shiva wears the horned moon, or a trident, in his hair; [3] in two examples of this scene the Indus figure has faces (or masks?) on the sides as well as the front of his head, while Shiva is often “Five-faced” (
Pancha-mukha
); (4) the figure is flanked by an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a water buffalo; smaller horned animals—antelope or goats—huddle beneath his stool, and he wears a tiger’s skin on his torso, while Shiva is called the Lord of Beasts, Pashupati, and wears an animal skin, sometimes of a tiger, sometimes of an elephant;
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and (5) both figures are ithyphallic.

I bought into the identification with Shiva in 1973,
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as most scholars have continued to do right up to the present day. Yet many other candidates have also been pushed forward,
⁵⁹
another good example of the Rorschach (or Rashomon
^au
) phenomenon that produced such rich fantasies about the decipherment of the script. A list of just a few of the figures with which the so-called Lord of Beasts has been identified, a list that the reader should not take seriously but merely skim over to see how creatively scholars can run amok, might run like this (in more or less chronological order):

1. A goddess, on whom the bulge previously identified as an “erect phallus” is nothing but a girdle worn by female IVC figurines.
⁶⁰

2. Mahisha, the buffalo demon killed, in later mythology, by the goddess Durga, who is often represented as a riding on a tiger
⁶¹
(or a lion).

3. Indra, the Vedic king of the gods,
⁶²
a conclusion supported by taking the first syllables of the Sanskrit words for three of the animals (eliminating the tiger, because it was much larger than the other animals, and the deer, because they are seated apart from the others, and repeating the first syllable of the word for “man,” because he was twice as important as the others), so that they spell out
ma-kha-na-sha-na
, an epithet of Indra (though also of Shiva), “destroying the sacrifice.”
^av

4. Rudra, a Vedic prototype of Shiva, surrounded by animals who are incarnations of the Maruts, the storm gods who serve Indra and Rudra.
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5. Agni. The pictograms are read to mean “burning in three ways” and so to identify the figure as Agni, the god of fire, who has three forms.
⁶⁴

6. A chief named Anil, who ruled over the clans whose totems were the animals on the seal.
⁶⁵

7. A “seated” bull.
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8. A sage (named Rishyashringa [“Antelope-horned”]) who had a single antelope horn growing out of his forehead (his mother was a white-footed antelope; it’s a long story); he appears in the earliest layers of Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
⁶⁷

9. Part of “a bull cult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.”
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10. A yogic posture,
⁶⁹
even if the link with Shiva is tenuous.
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Most, but not all, of these fantasies assume that the image is a representation of either a priest or a god, more likely a god.
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In each case, the interpretation was inspired or constrained by the particular historical circumstances and agendas of the interpreter, but I’d love to know what the scholars who came up with these ideas were smoking.

There is, in fact, a general resemblance between this image and later Hindu images of Shiva. The Indus people may well have created a symbolism of the divine phallus, or a horned god, or both. But even if this is so, it does not mean that the Indus images are the source of the Hindu images. We must keep this caution in mind now when we consider the images of women in the IVC.

The widespread depiction of women in the IVC artifacts suggests that they were highly valued. In contrast with the predilection for macho animals (includingmen) on the seals, the many terra-cotta figurines are mostly women, some wearing a wide girdle, a necklace, and an elaborate headdress. They are “Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometimes mini-skirted.”
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Some of them seem to be pregnant, or to hold, on their breasts or hips, small lumps that might be infants, “evidence perhaps that they expressed a concern for fecundity,” a reasonable assumption;
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they may have been symbols of fecundity in a “loosely structured household cult.”
⁷⁴

But why assume any cult at all? Why need they symbolize fertility? Or even if they do, why should fertility have to be ritual? (I must confess to having fallen for this too more than a quarter of a century ago: “[S]trong evidence of a cult of the Mother has been unearthed at the pre-Vedic civilization of the Indus Valley [c. 2000 B.C.].”
⁷⁵
Live and learn.) But not every image is symbolic; not every woman is a goddess. The “prominent and clumsily applied breasts” of these figures have been taken as evidence that they were “fertility symbols,”
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but they may have been valued simply for what P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster used to refer to as a “wonderful profile.” Big breasts are as useful to courtesans as to goddesses. Are the buxom centerfolds of
Playboy
magazine fertility symbols, or the voluptuous women that Rubens loved to paint? One seal shows a woman, upside down, with a child (or is it a scorpion?) coming out of (or into?) her, between her spread thighs.
⁷⁷
This has been taken to refer to “a possible Mother Earth myth,”
⁷⁸
but what was the myth, and is the upside-down woman a goddess, let alone an earth goddess? Why is she not simply a woman giving birth?

Scholars have seen connections between the alleged Lord of Beasts and a goddess, particularly the Hindu goddess who rides on a lion; some (casually conflating lions and tigers) connect the tiger on the seals with Hindu goddesses of a later period or with goddesses of ancient Egypt, the Aegean, Asia Minor, and the whole of West Asia, who were thought to consort with lions, leopards, or panthers.
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The assumption that the figures of women found at the Indus sites are goddesses is then used to support the argument that the goddesses in later Hinduism—or the minor Vedic goddesses, Yakshinis and Apsarases, associated with trees and water
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—may be traced back to this early period.
⁸¹

Hindsight speculations about fertility sects associated with female figurines, the bull, the horned deity, and trees like the sacred fig (pipal) are tempting. The seal with the person emerging from the middle of a fig tree may or may not prefigure the later Indian iconography of fig trees and banyan trees.
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But it is going too far to interpret something so straightforward as a grave containing a male and female skeleton as “possibly the first indication of the well-known Hindu custom of sati” (live widows burning themselves to death on their dead husbands’ cremation pyres or entombing themselves in their husband’s graves).
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The couple may simply have been buried side by side, whenever they died.

Some of the figures of well-endowed women are “curiously headless,” and in some cases of actual adult burial the feet had been deliberately cut off, a fascinating correspondence, perhaps joined in a Procrustean syndrome. These headless female figures
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may foreshadow the headless goddesses who people later Hindu mythology, such as the Brahmin woman who exchanged heads with the Pariah woman. (Or is it just that the neck is the thinnest part of such figures and most likely to break?) The prevalence of images of women may well indicate “a greater social presence of the female than in later times, which may also have been a generally more assertive presence.”
⁸⁵

One tiny (ten-centimeter) bronze image supports the hope that some Indus women did in fact have an “assertive presence” and that is the so-called dancing girl of Mohenjo-Daro, in whom Marshall saw a “youthful impudence.” John Keay describes her wonderfully well:

Others too admired her “gaunt and boyish femininity,” her provocative “foot-less stance, haughty head, and petulantly poised arms,”
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and found “something endearing” in “the artless pose of an awkward adolescent.”
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She is said to have “proto-Australoid” features that are also attested in skeletons in the Indus Valley.
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This native girl mocks us, perhaps for our clumsy and arrogant attempts to figure out what she, and her compatriots in bronze and clay and soapstone, “mean.”

The larger archaeological remains are equally ambiguous. Consider the very large swimming pool or bathing tank or public water tank in the citadel at Mohenjo-Daro, approximately forty feet by twenty-three feet and eight feet deep. There are wide steps leading down to it at each end and colonnaded buildings with small rooms around it. From this some have concluded that it was the site of a “Great Bath” where ritual bathing took place as part of a state religion.
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But all that this structure tells us is that the IVC people liked to bathe, just to get clean or to cool off on hot days or to splash about, same as we do. Cleanliness is next to godliness, but not synonymous with it. The great attention paid to the sewage system in the IVC suggests a hard-headed approach to hygiene (unless, of course, one wants to view the sewers as sacred underground chambers). Why does the bath have to be a ritual bath?
^aw

The answer is simple enough: because the so-called Great Bath resembles the ritual bathing tanks of Hindu temples that began to appear in the subcontinent in the first few centuries CE
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and because such a tank reflects a concern with ritual purification through water, an important idea in Hinduism.
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Four thousand years later, indeed, every temple has its tank. Therefore, the argument goes, the tank must have served the same function in the IVC. Similarly, the so-called College of Priests in Mohenjo-Daro has been taken as evidence for the existence of a widespread priesthood.
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Well, it’s a big building, true, but why couldn’t it be a dorm, or a hotel, or a hospital, or even a brothel?