The Hindus (38 page)

According to Jaina traditions, when Chandragupta, under the influence of a Jaina sage, saw his subjects dying of a famine that he had failed to counteract, he abdicated and fasted to death at Shravana Belgola, in Southwest India. Bindusara succeeded him in 297 BCE. And then Bindusara died, and Ashoka became king, ruling from 265 to 232 BCE and further extending the boundaries of the Mauryan Empire.

Let us bracket until the next chapter the details of Ashoka’s reign and move on to the subsequent history of this period.

In 183 BCE, Pushyamitra, a Brahmin who was the commander of the army, assassinated the last Maurya (who was allegedly a half-wit), took control of the empire through a palace coup, and founded the Shunga dynasty. Buddhists say that Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists and gave increasing patronage to Vedic Brahmins, and an inscription proclaims his renewed sponsorship of sacrifices, including not one but two horse sacrifices, by which he established his dynasty. It is possible that Pushyamitra himself
^eb
acted as the officiating priest.
¹⁴
He is also alleged to have performed a human sacrifice in the city of Kaushambi .
¹⁵
Be that as it may, by killing the last Mauryan king, he overthrew a Kshatriya ruler and established a renewed Vedic order. Like the Kshatriya sages of the Upanishads, Pushyamitra reinstated the ancient priest-king model, though from the other direction: Instead of an Upanishadic royal sage—a Kshatriya with the knowledge that Brahmins usually had—he was a warrior priest, a Brahmin who played the role of a king. A passage in a much later text implies that the Shungas were of low birth,
¹⁶
but other sources identify Pushyamitra’s Shunga dynasty as an established Brahmin clan. Whatever his origins, Pushyamitra seems to have established a new Brahmin kingship and reigned for a quarter of a century (c. 185-151 BCE). On these shifting political, religious, and economic sands, Brahmins constituted the most consistently homogeneous group, because of their widespread influence in education and their continuing status as hereditary landholders.
¹⁷
Long after many of the Hindu kingdoms had fallen, the Brahmin class within them still survived.

Yet Buddhists thrived, as their sources of income shifted to a wider base. Buddhist monuments depict many scenes of popular devotion and were often financed not by dynastic patronage but by individual benefactors, both monks and nuns within the institutions and, outside, merchants increasingly interested in the security and patronage that religious centers offered in an age of political uncertainty.
¹⁸
During this period the whole community—landowners, merchants, high officials, common artisans—funded major Buddhist projects. In Orissa (Kalinga), King Kharavela, a Jaina, published a long autobiographical inscription in which he claims to have supported a Jaina monastery and had Jaina texts compiled and to have respected every sect and repaired all shrines.
¹⁹
Women, including women from marginal social positions (such as courtesans), also patronized Buddhists and Jainas. The widespread public recognition of such women both as donors and as renouncers also had an impact on the role of women within Hinduism and on the development of Hindu religious rituals that came to replace the Vedic sacrifice.

Kingdoms now began to dominate the political scene and to have enough of a sense of themselves to be almost constantly at war with one another. The ancient Indian king was called “the one who wants to conquer” (
vijigishu
). That, together with the “circle” theory of politics, according to which the country on your border was your enemy, and your enemy’s enemy was your ally, and so forth, made for relentless aggression. Kings killed for thrones; parricide was rampant.
²⁰

The historian Walter Ruben summarized the period well:

And with that grim historical prelude, let us consider the story of Rama.

The
Ramayana
may have begun as a story as early as 750 BCE,
²²
but it did not reach its present form until between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Its world therefore begins in the North Indian world of the Upanishads (characters such as Janaka of Videha play important roles in both the Upanishads and the
Ramayana
) and continues through the world of the
shastras
(c. 200 CE). The
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
mark the transition from the corpus of texts known as
shruti
, the unalterable Vedic canon, to those known as
smriti
, the human tradition. They are religious texts, which end with the “fruits of hearing” them (“Any woman who hears this will bear strong sons,” etc.). Hindus from the time of the composition of these poems to the present moment know the characters in the texts just as Euro-Americans, even if they are not religious, know Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark. Hindus can ask, “What would Rama do?” This popularization also means that we now find more input from non-Brahmin authors and that new issues arise regarding the status of the lower classes. We also have more information about women, who, in these stories, at least, are still relatively free, though that freedom is now beginning to be challenged.

The
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
were probably composed and performed first in the interstices between engagements on a battleground, to an audience that probably consisted largely of Kshatriyas and miscellaneous camp followers. The first bards who recited it were a caste called Charioteers (Sutas), probably but not certainly related to the chariot drivers who appear frequently in narratives, like Vrisha with King Triyaruna. Each Charioteer would have gone into battle with one warrior as a combination chauffeur and bodyguard. And then at night, when all the warriors retired from the field and took off their armor and had their wounds patched and got massaged and perhaps drunk, the bards would tell the stories of their exploits as everyone sat around the campfires. Thus the Charioteer served not just as a driver but as a herald, friend, and confidant, providing the warrior with advice, praise, and criticism.
²³
This combination of roles
^ec
made the Charioteers, on the one hand, trusted counselors in court circles and, on the other, so far below the courtiers in status (being, through their connection with animals, roughly equivalent to Vaishyas) that when the warrior Karna, in the
Mahabharata
, was thought to be the son of a Charioteer, the princes scorned him.

Later, traveling bards no longer participated in battle, or drove chariots at all, but still recited the great poems in villages and at festivals and still retained their low social status; in addition, priestly singers praised the king in the course of royal sacrifices, while later in the evening the royal bard would sing poems praising the king’s accomplishments in war and battle.
²⁴
The
Mahabharata
says that the Charioteers told their stories during the intervals of a great sacrifice, and the audience in this later period would have been, on the one hand, more Brahminical—for the Brahmins were in charge of both the sacrifice and the literature of sacrifice—and, on the other hand, more diverse, as the camp followers would now be replaced by men and women of high as well as low class, who would have been present at the public ceremonies where the tales were recited. At this point the texts were probably circulated orally, as is suggested by their formulaic, repetitious, and relatively simple language.
²⁵

Later still, the reciters, and improvisers, were probably the Brahmins who were officiating at the sacrifice and recited the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
in the interstices between rituals on the sacrificial ground and probably also at shrines (
tirthas
) along pilgrimage routes. These Brahmins eventually committed the texts to writing. Some scholars believe that the texts were composed by Brahmins from the start,
²⁶
Brahmins all the way down. But the Sanskrit tradition itself states unequivocally, and surprisingly, that non-Brahmins, people of low caste, were originally in charge of the care and feeding of the two great Sanskrit poems, which Brahmins took over only sometime later, one of many instances of the contributions of low-caste people to Sanskrit literature. And the bards really did memorize all of it.
^ed
27
The literate too knew the texts by heart and wrote commentaries on written versions of them.

The texts of the two great poems, originally composed orally, were preserved both orally and in manuscript form for more than two thousand years.
^ee
Their oral origins made it possible both for a great deal of folklore and other popular material to find its way into these Sanskrit texts and for the texts to get into the people. Scenarios in the texts may have been re-created in dramatic performance in towns and villages.
²⁸
But the texts were also eventually consigned to writing and preserved in libraries; since the climate and the insects tend to destroy manuscripts, they have to be recopied every two hundred years or so if they are to survive; someone has to choose them and to go to the trouble and expense of having them copied. Buddhism and Jainism had bequeathed to Hinduism, by the seventh century CE, the tradition of gaining merit by having sacred manuscripts copied and donating them to libraries, and that is how these texts were preserved, generating merit for the patrons and income for the scribes.
²⁹

Valmiki’s Sanskrit
Ramayana
, the oldest-surviving version of the tale, a text of some twenty thousand verses, establishes the basic plot:

Rama’s brothers are fractional brothers, not even half brothers. The childless king Dasharatha had obtained a magic porridge, infused with the essence of Vishnu, to share among his queens; he gave half to his first wife, Kausalya, who gave birth to Rama; three-eighths to Sumitra, who bore Lakshmana and Shatrughna (each made of three-sixteenths of Vishnu), and one-eighth to Kaikeyi, who bore Bharata.
^ef

The
Ramayana
, composed at a time when kingdoms like Videha were becoming powerful in a post-Mauryan era, legitimates monarchy through the vision of the golden age of Ram-raj, Rama’s Rule. This vision occurs twice in the
Ramayana
, once at the end of the sixth of the seven books, when Rama and Sita are united after her fire ordeal (6.130)—“There were no widows in distress, nor any danger from snakes or disease; people lived for a thousand years”—and then again at the end of the last book, when Sita has departed forever:

This time of peace and prosperity became the template for a kind of theocracy that haunted Indian politics for centuries to come. But the actual historical scene, with its parricides and usurpations, also produced a royal paranoia that is revealed in the underside of Ram-raj, surfacing in palace coups such as the plot to have Bharata take the throne in place of Rama (2.8.18-27) and the machinations of the “bears and monkeys and ogres” that are said to remain under Rama’s control in Ram-raj.