The Hindus (66 page)

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 the
Mahabharata
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.

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 Purana
mention, 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:

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:

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.

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.

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 the
Book 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.