The Hindus (95 page)

The legends about Chandidas tell us how the tradition regarded him. His poems say that he was a Brahmin and a village priest who openly declared his love for a low-caste washerwoman named Rami. Legends say that he was dismissed as a priest and fasted to death as a protest but came to life again on the funeral pyre, or that the begum of Gaur took such a fancy to him that her jealous husband, the nawab, had him whipped to death while tied to the back of an elephant.

The Bengali saint Chaitanya (1486-1533) was born into a Brahmin family and received a sound education in the Sanskrit sacred texts. After the death of his father when he was twenty-two, he made a pilgrimage to Gaya to perform the funeral rituals, and there he had a religious experience that inspired him to renounce the world. The world, however, would not renounce him; people flocked to him and joined him in singing songs (
kirtana
) to Krishna and dancing in a kind of trance, as well as repeating the names of Krishna, worshiping temple icons or the tulsi plant (a kind of basil sacred to Vishnu), and retelling Krishna’s acts, particularly his loveplay with the cowherd women (Gopis).
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Chaitanya settled in Orissa in the town of Puri (rather than Vrindavan, the scene of Krishna’s youth) at his mother’s urging, so that he could more easily stay in touch with her. He had frequent epileptic seizures and may have died by drowning while in a state of religious ecstasy.

Chaitanya and his followers believed that he was an incarnation of Krishna and Radha in one body, where at last the two gods (and Chaitanya) could simultaneously experience the bliss of both sides of the couple in union.
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The Bengali sect called Sahajiyas (“Naturalists”) saw Krishna and Radha united not only in Chaitanya but in every man and every woman; their goal was not to worship or imitate Krishna or Radha, in a dualistic, bhakti sense, but to become them, in a monistic and Tantric sense, to realize both male and female powers within their own bodies.
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They praised the ideal of love for another man’s wife or for a woman of unsuitably low caste, or an unmarried woman’s love for a man (for even in texts in which Radha is not anyone else’s wife, she is usually not Krishna’s wife), because they admired the intensity of such love in the face of social disapproval. The adulterous love between Krishna and Radha or the Gopis made a positive virtue of the addictive vice of lust, coming down solidly on the side of passion and against the control of passion through renunciation; adulterous passion, which had long been the benchmark of what religion was designed to prevent, now became a metaphor for the proper love of god.

Yet unlike the model of Shiva as Skull Bearer, these ideals were never taken as paradigms for an
imitatio dei;
they were theological parables, not licenses to commit adultery. The difference can be accounted for when we consider the radical contrast between the relatively lawless period in which the Kapalikas thrived, not to mention the antinomian nature of their community, and the more tempered and theocratic atmosphere of even the most erotic of the cults of Krishna.

Chaitanya was said to have reconverted the Muslim governor of Orissa back to Hinduism, from which he had converted and to which he had also converted many Pathans (ethnic Afghans).
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Chaitanya’s followers include many groups, beginning with the antinomian Bengali Sahajiyas, who were his contemporaries. His main disciples were the renunciants called Goswamins. One of them, Nityananda, continuing the paradigm, was said to be the incarnation of Balarama, Krishna’s brother. In his efforts to convert the Bengali Tantrics, Nityananda is said to have consorted with “prostitutes, drunkards, and others of dubious character,” behavior that his followers justified by his association with Balarama, who was known for his excesses.
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Other Goswamins developed an erotic devotional theology that incorporated still more antinomian and ecstatic Tantric influences and took root among the people known as Bauls.
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At the same time, many worshipers in the Chaitanya tradition, recoiling from the antinomian Tantric variations on the theme of Krishna and Radha that had made them the target of social opprobrium,
²¹
developed a different tradition and went back to the
Gita-Govinda
for their central imagery, emphasizing not the union but the separation (
viraha
) of the two lovers and the suffering of longing for the otiose god, the renunciation rather than the passion of love. Once again, a Tantric tradition had split in two. These Goswamins, anxious to prevent the story of Krishna and Radha from becoming a model for human behavior, hastened to sanitize the myth by reversing the locus of the real people and the shadows; where in earlier texts the Gopis had left shadow images of themselves in bed with their husbansds while they danced with Krishna, now some of the Goswamins specified that the
real
Gopis remained in bed with their husbands and merely sent their shadow doubles to dance with the god. The quasi-Tantric Bengal traditions debated for centuries whether Krishna and Radha were married or, as they put it, whether Radha was Krishna’s wife (“his own” [
svakiya
]) or his mistress (“someone else’s” [
parakiya
]), and they decided, in 1717, that adulterous love was in fact orthodox.
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The question of role models was a pressing one, for in Bengal Vaishnavism the worshiper is inspired to decide not which of the personae dramatis s/he would like to play, but who s/he is: the mother, lover, servant, or friend of Krishna.
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Bhakti was better suited for women, who could be god’s lovers and mothers, the most intimate roles, whereas male worshipers had to pretend to be women (some of them withdrawing to menstruate every month). This gave women a great measure of spiritual authority, though not necessarily practical authority. Rupagosvamin wrote of “the devotion that follows from passion” (
raganuga bhakti
), in contrast with scriptural devotion (
vaidhi bhakti
). In the familiar pattern, both paths lead to Krishna.

Yet another branch of Bengali Vaishnavas rejected the renunciation espoused (if one can espouse renunciation) by both the Goswamins and the lineages of the philosophers Ramanuja and Madhva. These were the Radhavallabhas (“Radha’s Darlings”), who venerated the householder stage, rejected renunciation, and regarded Krishna not as the supreme deity but as the servant of the goddess Radha. As one British scholar put it, Krishna “may do the coolie-work of building the world, but Radha sits as Queen. He is at best but her Secretary of State.”
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Many of the Bangla verses of Chandidasa and the Maithili verses of Vidyapati (in the fourteen and fifteenth centuries) are written from the standpoint of a Radha who is more powerful than Krishna.

Continuing the Bengali tradition, the celebration of poverty by the poet Ramprasad (1720-1781) served both as solace for other people truly in need and as a metaphor for spiritual poverty, though the upper castes supported Ramprasad quite well and he gave no opposition to caste. His poetry bristles with references to real life: to poverty, farmers, debts, absentee landlords, lawyers, leaking boats, merchants, and traders.
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Strong Tantric influences are also evident in the wine and drunkenness that pervaded both his poetry and (as the stories go) his life.
²⁶

Tukaram was a Shudra who lived in Maharashtra from 1608 to 1649. None of his poems were written down in his lifetime; all that we have were later transcribed from oral traditions, along with legends about him. According to one story, which bears a suspicious resemblance to the story of the floating South Indian texts and, closer to home, to the buoyancy of Tulsidas’s text, angry Brahmins forced Tukaram to throw all his manuscripts into the river in his native village. Tukaram fasted and prayed, and after thirteen days the sunken notebooks reappeared from the river, undamaged.
²⁷
He married, but since his wife was chronically ill, he took a second wife. When the great famine of 1629 killed his parents, his first wife, and some of his children, he abandoned the householder’s life, ignored his debts and the pleas of his (second) wife and his remaining children, and went off into the wilderness. He became a poet, devoted to the god Vitthal, speaking in the idiom that the Marathi poets had fashioned out of the songs that ordinary housewives sang at home and that farmers, traders, craftsmen, and laborers sang at popular religious festivals. Some say he ended his life by throwing himself into the same river where his poems had sunk and reemerged. His poems, which challenge caste and denounce Brahmins, also denounce the ascetic: “He must consume a lot of bhang, and opium, and tobacco;/ But his hallucinations are perpetual.”
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His poems often imagine the relationship between god and his devotee as the relationship between a secret lover and an adulteress (as many bhakti poets do) or, more unusually, as the violent relationship between a murderer (in this case a Thug, a member of a pack of thieves, stranglers, and worshipers of the goddess Kali) and his victim: “The Thug has arrived in Pandhari./ He will garrotte his victim with the cord of love.”
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He also imagines the divine relationship as a bond between a master and a dog:

Dogs were one sort of religious symbol; horses were another. And real, as well as symbolic, horses played a major role in Hindu-Muslim relations under the Mughals; horse trading, both literal and figurative, was the common theme. A great deal of the revenue drawn from taxing the peasants was spent on royal horses. In Haridwar, in the Mughal period, the great spring horse fair coincided, not by coincidence, with a famous religious festival that drew thousands of pilgrims to the banks of the Ganges each year. This combination of trade and pilgrimage was widespread; the Maharashtrian and Sikh generals and their troops came to the fairs to pay their devotion at the holy places in the morning and secure a supply of warhorses in the afternoon.
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When the Europeans arrived in India in the Mughal period, horses were very expensive animals, the best ones costing up to ten thousand dollars.
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More than 75 percent of Mughal horses were imported, mostly from Central Asia. Babur seems to have spent more time in the saddle than on the ground, and took a personal interest in the horses.
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Akbar had 150,000 to 200,000 cavalry-men, plus the emperor’s own crack regiment of another 7,000.
³⁴
Abu’l Fazl tells us how important horses were to Akbar, for ruling, conquest, presentation as gifts, and general convenience;
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Akbar even had luminous polo balls made so that he could play night games.
³⁶
The horses, as always, were mostly imported: “Merchants bring to court good horses from Iraq, Turky, Turkestan . . . Kirghiz, Tibet, Kashmir and other countries. Droves after droves arrive from Turan and Iran, and there are nowadays twelve thousand in the stables of his Majesty.”
³⁷

Abu’l Fazl insists, however, that the best horses of all were bred in India, particularly in the Punjab,
^js
Mewat, Ajmer, and Bengal near Bihar. He continues:

This, then, is the answer to the apparent contradiction: Indian horses (or, rather, some Indian horses) are Arab horses, and there is no contest.

The Arab horses from Kutch were probably the sires of the most distinctive native Indian breed. Sometime before the eleventh century, a clan of Rajput warriors developed a new breed of warhorses from Arab and Turkmen stock in Marwar (a state whose capital was the city of Jodhpur, the city from which the riding pants and short boots adopted by the British in the nineteenth century take their name). The Marwari is a desert horse with a thick, arched neck, long-lashed eyes, flaring nostrils, and distinctive ears, which curve inward to a sharp point, meeting to form an almost perfect arch at the tips. Aficionados compare the shape of the Marwari’s ears to the lyre, to the scorpion’s arched stinger, and to the Rajputs’ trademark handlebar mustaches, turned upright and set on their thick, bushy ends. (The Kathiawar horse from Gujarat has the same special ears but is not quite so tall or so long.)
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Despite these occasional breeding successes, negative factors made the Indian horse into a beast so rarefied that it became more mythical than practical. Ever since the Arabs entered India, then the Turks, and then the Mongols who were to become the Mughals, and despite a few passing references to the Scythians and the British, it has almost always been the Muslims who play the role of good and evil foreign horsemen in the local equine rituals and mythologies of India. These myths and rituals, though not always documented in the Mughal period, are often about the Mughals. The corpus of Hindu myths that depicts the Turks and Arabs bringing horses into India seems to have assimilated the historical experience of the importation of horses not only to the lingering vestiges—the cultural hoofprints, as it were—of Vedic horse myths but also to the cross-cultural theme of magical horses brought from heaven or the underworld.
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