The Hindus (5 page)

Moreover, to the mix of philology and history we must add another factor, individuality. The question of originality is always a puzzle, in part because we can never account for individual genius; of course ideas don’t arise in a vacuum, nor are they nothing but the sum total of ideas that came before them. Individuals have ideas, and those ideas are often quite different from the ideas of other people living at the same time and place. This is particularly important to keep in mind when we search for the voices of marginalized people, who often achieve as individuals what they cannot achieve as a group. People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist; Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.

In Indian history, individuals have turned the tide of tolerance or violence even against the current of the zeitgeist. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar, for example, initiated highly original programs of religious tolerance, going in the teeth of the practices of their times. Someone with a peculiar, original, individual bent of mind wrote the “There Was Not” (
nasadiya
) hymn of the
Rig Veda
, and the story of Long-Tongue the Bitch in the
Jaiminiya Brahmana
, and the story of Raikva under the cart (one of the earliest homeless people noted in world literature) in the Upanishads. And these individual innovators in the ancient period did not merely compose in Sanskrit. They also lurked in the neglected byways of oral traditions, sometimes in the discourses of women and people of the lower classes, as well as in the broader-based Sanskrit traditions that those local traditions feed. For original ideas are rare both among people who have writing and among those that do not. Public individuals too—such as Ashoka, Akbar, and Gandhi, on the one hand, Aurangzeb, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, and M. S. Golwalkar, on the other, to take just a few at random—brought about profound transformations in Hinduism.

The question of flourishing is less puzzling than the question of innovation, and we can often ask how a particular king (or political movement, or climactic change) helped the horse sacrifice (or the worship of a goddess or anything else) to survive and thrive. Often history can explain why some ideas take hold and spread while others do not; ideas take root only when they become important to people at a particular time, when they hitch on to something that those people care about. An understanding of the social context of the Upanishads, reintroducing the world into the text, may go a long way to explain not who first thought of the story of Raikva but why the Brahmins were willing to include his story in their texts despite the ways in which it challenged their social order.

In addition to understanding the history of the texts, we need to understand the relationship between records of historical events and the construction of imaginary worlds as well as the symbolism that often joins them. To begin with the symbolism of physical objects, sometimes a linga is just a linga—or, more often, both a linga and a cigar. Numerous Sanskrit texts and ancient sculptures (such as the Gudimallam linga from the third century BCE) define this image unequivocally as an iconic representation of the male sexual organ in erection, in particular as the erect phallus of the god Shiva. So too a verse from the “Garland of Games” of Kshemendra, a Brahmin who lived in Kashmir in the eleventh century, refers to the human counterpart of the Shiva linga: “Having locked up the house on the pretext of venerating the linga, Randy scratches her itch with a linga of skin.”
⁴
The first linga in this verse is certainly Shiva’s, and there is an implied parallelism, if not identity, between it and the second one, which could be either a leather dildo or its human prototype, attached to a man. And many Hindus have, like Freud, seen lingas in every naturally occurring elongated object, the so-called self-created (
svayambhu
) lingas, including
objets trouvés
such as stalagmites. The linga in this physical sense is well known throughout India, a signifier that is understood across barriers of caste and language, a
linga franca
, if you will.

But other texts treat the linga as an aniconic pillar of light or an abstract symbol of god (the word means simply a “sign,” as smoke is the sign of fire), with no sexual reference. To some, the stone lingas “convey an ascetic purity despite their obvious sexual symbolism.”
⁵
There is nothing surprising about this range; some Christians see in the cross a vivid reminder of the agony on Calvary, while others see it as a symbol of their God in the abstract or of Christianity as a religion. But some Hindus who see the linga as an abstract symbol
therefore object
to the interpretations of those who view it anthropomorphically; their Christian counterparts would be people who refuse to acknowledge that the cross ever referred to the passion of Christ. Visitors to the Gudimallam linga in the early twenty-first century noted that while the large linga as a whole remains entirely naked, with all its anatomical detail, the small image of a naked man on the front of the linga was covered with a chaste cloth, wrapped around the whole linga as a kind of total loincloth (or fig leaf) simultaneously covering up the middle of the man in the middle of the linga and the middle of the linga itself. Here is a fine example of a tradition driving with one foot on the brake and the other on the accelerator. We need to be aware of both the literal and symbolic levels simultaneously, as we see both the rabbit and the man in the moon.

Similarly, we have to be careful how we use history and myth to understand one another. In this context I would define a myth as a story that a group of people believe for a long time despite massive evidence that it is not actually true; the spirit of myth is the spirit of Oz: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. When we read a text that says that a Hindu king impaled eight thousand Jainas, we need to use history to understand myth—that is, we need to understand why such a text was composed and retold many times; that means knowing the reasons for the tensions between Hindus and Jainas at that time (such as the competition for royal patronage). But we cannot use the myth to reconstruct the actual history behind the text; we cannot say that the text is evidence that a Hindu king actually did impale Jainas. To take another example, when the
Ramayana
speaks of ogres (Rakshasas), it may be simultaneously constructing an imaginary world in which evil forces take forms that can destroy us and using ogres as a metaphor for particular types of human beings. But it does not record an actual event, a moment when people from Ayodhya overcame real people in India (tribals, or Dravidians, or anyone else), nor does the story of the building of the causeway to Lanka mean that Rama and a bunch of monkeys actually built a causeway to (Sri) Lanka. Such myths reveal to us the history of sentiments rather than events, motivations rather than movements.

The history of ideas, even if not a source of “hard” history, is still a very precious thing to have. For stories, and the ideas in stories, do influence history in the other direction, into the future. People who heard or read that story about the impaled Jainas may well have acted differently toward Jainas and/or Hindus (better or worse) as a result. More often than not, we do not know precisely what happened in history, but we often know the stories that people tell about it. As a character in a Garrison Keillor novel remarks, “There are no answers, only stories.”
⁶
In some ways, the stories are not only all that we have access to but all that people at the time, and later, had access to and hence all that drove the events that followed. Real events and sentiments produce symbols, symbols produce real events and sentiments, and real and symbolic levels may be simultaneously present in a single text. Myth has been called “the smoke of history,”
⁷
and my intention is to balance the smoke of myth with the fire of historical events, as well as to demonstrate how myths too become fires when they do not merely respond to historical events (as smoke arises from fire) but drive them (as fire gives rise to smoke). Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat started a revolution in India. For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.

Is there a unique and distinct phenomenon worth naming that covers the religion(s) of the people from the Veda (c. 1200 BCE) to the Hare Krishnas in American airports and that tells us where Hinduism ends and Buddhism begins? It is useful to distinguish the objection that there is no such thing as Hinduism in the sense of a single unified religion, from the objection that the people we call Hindus lack a category, or word, for Hinduism and identify themselves not as Hindus but as Indians or as Bengali Vaishnavas (worshipers of Vishnu, living in Bengal). That is, we may ask: (1) Is there such a thing as Hinduism?; (2) is that the best thing to call it?; and (3) can we do so even if Hindus didn’t/don’t? These are related but separate questions. Let’s consider the phenomenon and the name one by one.

There are several objections to the use of any single term to denote what, for the sake of argument, we will call Hindus and Hinduism.
^p

Hindus did not develop a strong sense of themselves as members of a distinct religion until there were other religions against which they needed to define themselves, like the invisible man in the Hollywood film who could be seen only when he was wearing clothing that was not a part of him. Until as late as the seventeenth century, many Indian rulers used titles that identified them with a divinity or with their preeminence over other rulers or with their personal qualities or with all their subjects, but not merely with the Hindus. Cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities in India, and few people defined themselves exclusively through their religious beliefs or practices; their identities were segmented on the basis of locality, language, caste, occupation, and sect.
⁸
Only after the British began to define communities by their religion, and foreigners in India tended to put people of different religions into different ideological boxes,
⁹
did many Indians follow suit, ignoring the diversity of their own thoughts and asking themselves which of the boxes they belonged in.
¹⁰
Only after the seventeenth century did a ruler use the title Lord of the Hindus (Hindupati).
¹¹

Indeed most people in India would still define themselves by allegiances other than their religion.
¹²
The Hindus have not usually viewed themselves as a group, for they are truly a rainbow people, with different colors (
varna
s in Sanskrit, the word that also designates “class”), drawing upon not only a wide range of texts, from the many unwritten traditions and vernacular religions of unknown origins to Sanskrit texts that begin well before 1000 BCE and are still being composed, but, more important, upon the many ways in which a single text has been read over the centuries, by people of different castes, genders, and individual needs and desires. And this intertextuality is balanced by an equally rainbow-hued range of practices, which we might call an interpracticality, on the model of intertextuality, practices that refer to other practices.

Another objection to regarding Hinduism as a monolithic entity is that it is hard to spell out what “they all” believe or do (even if we exclude from “all” people like Shirley MacLaine). There is no single founder or institution to enforce any single construction of
the
tradition, to rule on what is or is not a Hindu idea or to draw the line when someone finally goes too far and transgresses the unspoken boundaries of reinterpretation. Ideas about all the major issues—vegetarianism, nonviolence, even caste itself—are subjects of a debate, not a dogma. There is no Hindu canon. The books that Euro-Americans privileged (such as the
Bhagavad Gita
) were not always so highly regarded by “all Hindus,” certainly not before the Euro-Americans began to praise them. Other books have been far more important to certain groups of Hindus but not to others.

One answer to this objection is that like other religions—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam—Hinduism encompasses numerous miscellaneous sects. Religions are messy. But intertextuality (as well as interpracticality) argues for the inclusion of this unruly miscellany under the rubric of Hinduism. The fact that later texts and practices often quote earlier ones, right back to the
Rig Veda
, allows us to call it a single tradition, even though there are many other Hindu texts and practices that have no connection with any Sanskrit text, let alone the Veda. What literary critics call the anxiety of influence
¹³
works in the other direction in India. The individual artist composing a text or performing a ritual can make innovations, but she demonstrates first her knowledge of the traditions of the past and only then her ability to build upon them and even to reverse them. The assumption is that if she thinks she has an original idea, it means that she has forgotten its source.