The Pulping of Wendy Doniger's Book

Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus An Alternative History (2009), is  an almost unbelievably obtuse work of 700+ pages. After a first read-skim in 2009, I summed it up thus: “A work equaled in its confusion, incomprehension and malice perhaps only by John Mills’ History and Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. “

I noted one passage in particular as exemplifying the author's overall attitude and approach; on page 294, explaining the beginnings of the story of the Mahabharata, she writes:

“Where Rama and his brothers have different mothers and different wives but share both a single human father and a single divine father, the five Pandavas have one mother (and one wife) and one human father but different divine fathers.

“In this disastrous levirate, two wives give birth to three sons (two of whom have, for great-grandparents, a female fish, two Brahmins, and five kshatriyas, while the third has a Kshatriya, a female fish, two Brahmins and four slaves. Are you still with me?)”

Doniger's writing ensures that the reader has no chance to be “with” her, and most could be forgiven for thinking the Mahabharata is a freak show. Nowhere in the book does she assay the enormous wisdom of the epic or tell of its central role in shaping India.

Can we imagine any respectable scholarly work dealing with the New Testament or the Koran in this manner?

That is not the only reason for complaint.

Doniger is a professor of Sanskrit untrained in history or theology; all her knowledge of Hinduism is a sort of accidental accretion upon a vulgar, highly sexualized sensibility.

That explains why her naive measure of Hinduism never departs from the standard of her own Judeo-Christian heritage.

On page 25 she explains earnestly, “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.”

She thinks vegetarianism, nonviolence and caste are the "major issues" of Hinduism?! And even more nonsensical is the observation about the Gita. Similar absurdities litter almost every one of the 692 pages of the main text.

From the Hindu tendency to debate all things about their faith, Doniger deduces that “there is no such thing as Hinduism in the sense of a single unified religion…” The whole book is an extended argument of the well-worked colonial theme that Hinduism does not exist.

She seems oblivious to the fact that it is not a virtue in a religion to be "single" and "unified," for their inevitable corollaries are Inquisitions, fundamentalisms and wars. Hinduism is undefinable because it is focused on that most overweening of all realities, God.(See here for a series on Hinduism.)

Many other errors and falsifications are picayune. Chapter 21 takes us on a "fast gallop" over the "two centuries during which India was part of the British Empire."
Now which two centuries would that be?

Bengal fell to the British in 1757. Over the next 100 years British rule expanded slowly across the country; Punjab was taken in 1849. Then came the earthshaking events of 1857. After that their rule lasted 90 years. It would be accurate to say that bits and pieces of India were under British rule for a two-century period; overall, some 3/5ths of the country was part of it for half that time.

On page 574 she highlights the "Black Hole of Calcutta" as causing "dozens of deaths," and a few pages later, gives details, drastically lowering the number of British prisoners (146) that imperial propagandists had reported held in a dungeon under inhuman conditions, killing 123.

The story of the Black Hole was originally cooked up six months after the supposed atrocity by the head Calcutta honcho of the East India Company as he sailed back to Britain. His motive was to justify the aggression that brought Bengal under British rule, and it worked like a charm; no one in London thought of questioning how 146 Englishmen (and one woman) could possibly have fit in a cell 18 feet by 14.

It is a mystery why Doniger reprised the story in 2009 as if were true and falsified figures to make it seem believable.
     
But it does put the book in context and explain its dedication to British propagandist William Dalrymple, “inspiration and comrade in the good fight.”

I am sorry to see any book destroyed, but cannot join in the general censure of Penguin India. Its editors should have seen this coming a long way off and imposed a minimum of quality control.  

Britain and Hinduism 9: Ending the Kali Yuga

Bhima traveling alone through a forest finds the path blocked by a large monkey who claims to be too old and weak to move out of the way. The strongest of the Pandavas tries to lift his tail and pass by, but cannot move it a hair. Realizing someone of awesome power is before him, Bhima falls to his knees and asks the monkey who he is. It is Hanuman, the son of Vayu from a previous age, and thus Bhima’s older brother. In telling when he is from, Hanuman sums up briefly a uniquely Hindu aspect of Time: it has a moral dimension reflected in the quality of human virtue that changes in a cycle of four Yugas (eons).

In the first, the Krita (Perfect) Yuga, Virtue is whole and stands firmly on four legs. Life is effortless and the Vedas are an integral whole open to all eyes. In the Treta Yuga Virtue diminishes by a quarter but is still stable on three legs. Various diseases, lust, and natural calamities afflict people, and they undertake sacrifices and penances to avoid them. The Ramayana is set in the latter part of this period.

In the Dwapara Yuga half of Virtue remains intact, maintaining an unsteady balance on two legs. Dishonesty is a growing factor in human relationships and meritorious achievement requires great effort. The Vedas are in four parts and unknown to many. The war at Kurukshetra occurs at the end of this period and only Krishna’s presence on earth prevents the immediate onset of the degenerate Kali Yuga, when only a quarter of Virtue survives, standing unsteadily on a single leg. Evil is rampant in this final phase. Most people no longer remember the Vedas or know their own spiritual nature; only one in four is honest.

We are now in the Kali Yuga that began with the death of Krishna 16 years after the end of the Kurukshetra war. Gandhi’s political advent in South Africa a century ago marked the beginning of a period of transition, and the hugely positive changes since then signal that we are moving towards a new age of virtue. The Brahma Kumaris say we are now in a time of “Confluence,” with potential for revolutionary positive change.

How rapidly we realize that potential depends on each of us becoming aware that the corruptions of the Kali Yuga have blinded us to the nature of the world and of our own true selves. This whole series of posts has aimed to remedy that situation and in this one I look specifically at the origins and significance of Hinduism.

Who We Are

In September 2009, Nature published the report of a genetic mapping project by an Indo-American team of scientists that had studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. As one of the senior researchers told the Press, the team found evidence that “castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society,” and that the proportion of shared genes in the population ranged from 49 to 80 percent.

That evidence blew out of the water the ludicrous colonial-era theory that the caste system was a means of preserving the racial purity of White blond protoEuropean “Aryans” from the Caucasus, the “original Brahmins” the British credited with composing the Vedas while driving their chariots and cattle up and down the high Himalayan passes.

The genetic evidence pointed to the emergence of the caste system from an accommodation among indigenous tribes.

How did that happen? 

Most probably, it was the result of a successful effort to end the conflicts endemic among the many tribes of India by compiling their sacred lore into a work all could revere, the Vedas. Supporting that theory is the fact that the Vedas are the only Hindu texts considered divine in origin (shruti); all the rest are remembered works of human composition (smriti). The distinction makes sense only if the former contains the ageless Seen reality (veda) of the tribes. It is likely the compilation was done by the Saptarishis, the seven sages memorialized by ancient tradition as the stars pointing to Polaris.

Modern readers usually find Vedic hymns repetitive and often mundane, but to their original tribal audiences they must have been powerfully evocative of their commonalities of worship and ritual. The hymns celebrated Agni, sacred to all as ruler of altar and the hearth, cleanser, protector, receiver of sacrifices and messenger to the gods. They praised all things the tribes held in awe, the Sun and the Moon, Wind Thunder and Storm, the starry wheel of heaven and the lovely dawn. They propitiated the gods of the hunt and husbandry, weapons of war and the tools that built altar and home. They expressed wonder at the eternal mysteries of the spirit-world that lay beneath the great cycles of seasonal growth, death and rebirth. In all things the Vedas made obvious the deep kinship of the tribes, ending conflicts and allowing them to settle into a system of interdependent castes.

The next step in the evolution of Indian society involved discussions (Upanishads) among the country’s best and brightest that led, over time, to a coherent philosophy, a universal worldview and a humane value system. The Upanishads postulated an indefinably abstract and undifferentiated Brahman as the basic reality of the universe. From its manifestation as the Universal Soul (Paramatma) there emerged the endless diversity of Creation, governed by a Law (Dharma/Rita/Satya) inherent in every particle and pervading the cosmic reaches of Space and Time. A flux of endless delusion (Maya) cloaked the unity of Vasudev Kutumbakham, God’s family.

The Upanishads asserted that individual souls are of the same divine substance as the Universal Soul and thus immortal; but blinded by Maya, they are unaware of their true nature and must learn of it through long experience of repeated material reincarnations. The most enlightened souls escape the cycle of rebirths by merging with the Universal Soul (moksha); all others continue to be reborn until the cataclysmic end of all things (pralaya) at the conclusion of a Mahayuga.

In this dispensation the highest attribute of virtue/wisdom is the dispassionate observance of personal dharma; death is of little consequence as it only opens the door to a new life; and possessions are a hindrance to those seeking a clear view of the realities governing their soul’s progress.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata

The spare and noble philosophy of the Upanishads entered the everyday life of India through the Ramayana and Mahabharata, composed millennia apart and entirely different in significance and spirit, but unified in their concepts of what is of value in life and what is without worth. Celebrated by every generation in sacred legend, drama, dance and song, the two epics laid the foundations of a unified Indian culture and consolidated it as a civilization. They also marked key stages in the political evolution of Indian society.

The Ramayana records and extols the step up from caste-federation to unitary State. It is important to note how differently this change occurred in Europe and India. In Europe, unity came through conquest and oppression. India accomplished the transition peacefully because the Kshatriyas already had the established role of ensuring security, and it was necessary only to define the qualities and responsibilities of the king.

The Ramayana takes that in hand. Rama is not a military dictator. In the devotion to his father, love for Sita, loyalty to Laxman, and generosity towards Kaikei, he is the archetype of the good family man. He goes to war not to extend his kingdom or for profit but to regain his wife. In misfortune, he is graceful, in victory, modest. Rama is the God-king next door, neighborly, considerate and kind. Those qualities make him accessible to all Indians regardless of caste or social status, a point the Ramayana is at pains to underline. The gods applaud Rama sitting comfortably on the ground with the lowborn forest-dweller Guha. The Prince of Ayodhya eats the fruit a poor woman offers him after biting into it to make sure it is sweet; Lakshman protests but Rama silences him; she acts out of love. That unforced love of the ruler is the basis for Ramrajya, the ideal State.

The Ramayana also makes clear the iron commitment necessary from the ruler. Rama goes willingly into exile to uphold a pledge his father made; he sends away his beloved wife because of murmurs among the citizens of Ayodhya that Sita’s pregnancy soon after returning from Ravana’s clutches implied a violation that made her unfit to be queen. The lesson in both cases is the same: the integrity of the ruler is the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of the State; it must be beyond moral reproach. The personal happiness of the king cannot take precedence over that fundamental consideration.

Ravana serves as a negative foil to Rama in every way. Although a man of great accomplishments –thus the ten heads – he is arrogant, vicious, tyrannical, feared, and endlessly self-indulgent. Ramarajya is a time of golden contentment to the people of Ayodhya; Ravana’s rule brings disaster and ruin to Lanka.

The Mahabharata tells of a much later stage in India’s national life, when the ideals of Ramrajya are long gone and corrupt power-hungry men have control of the State. The whole work is a guide to survival in dark and confusing times. Ugrasrava, the narrator of the epic, lauds its high worth. “As the sun dispels the darkness, so does the Bharata by its discourses on religion, profit, pleasure and final release, dispel the ignorance of men. As the full moon by its mild light expands the buds of the water lily, so this Purana broadens the human intellect. With the lamp of history it illumines the whole mansion of nature.” The Mahabharata is the “fifth Veda” he says, outweighing the others because it makes their mysteries explicit.

Some 3000 years after its composition, the epic remains a sophisticated and surprisingly relevant work of political, philosophical and moral guidance. Consider, for example, the hidden significance of the origin and nature of the Pandavas and Kauravas.

Although always referred to as “cousins,” the two sets of siblings, are unrelated by blood. Pandu cannot father children because he is cursed with instant death if he has sex; his five sons are the progeny of different gods invoked by his two wives. Yudhisthira the firstborn is the son of Dharma. Maruti the Wind begets Bhima of immense strength. Indra king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt fathers Arjuna, the perfect warrior. The twin Aswins, skilled in the arts and husbandry that support life, are the parents of Nakula and Sahadeva.

Together, the sons of Pandu represent the strengths essential to any civilization: Law, Power, the capacity for war and the skills for peace. Despite their disparate parentage the Pandavas share an indissoluble brotherhood, and Vyasa clearly intends the brothers to exemplify India's unity in diversity; it requires no stretch of the imagination to see in Draupadi the beautiful and fruitful land that all of them love.

The Kauravas are also not the natural sons of blind Dhritrashtra. His wife Gandhari (from Gandhara, modern Afghanistan), is childless and becomes pregnant only through the magical intercession of Vyasa. Throughout the Mahabharata Vyasa’s appearance signals didactic intent, and in this instance it underlines a theme that drives the narrative to the end. Gandhari’s pregnancy is abnormally prolonged, and upon hearing of the birth of Pandu’s first son she loses patience and induces birth. What emerges from her womb is not a baby but a horrible ball of flesh, hard as iron. Vyasa returns to remonstrate with her. If she had not lost patience, her son would have been of unrivaled splendor. However, all is not lost: he cuts up the ball of flesh into a hundred and one pieces, putting each in a separate jar. When the test-tube babies emerge, all boys except for the youngest, they seem normal, even splendid; but the Kauravas are inescapably demonic.

As the Pandavas exemplify the attributes of a healthy society, the Kauravas illustrate the monstrous consequences of incontinence. Dhrithrashtra’s congenital blindness and Gandhari’s decision on her wedding day to assume a permanent blindfold, establish a theme Vyasa returns to repeatedly in his depiction of the Kauravas: Evil is rooted in the incapacity or willful refusal to see reality. Every fateful choice as they spiral down to doom illustrates the delusive power of egotism, greed, anger, hate and envy. No Satan plots their downfall, for Hinduism has no such entity; what seals their fate is a failure of compassion, the inability to see the kinship of all things underlying the world’s vast differentiation; without that spiritual cognition, they lack understanding and misjudge reality at every turn.

Such hidden teachings appear throughout the narrative and have generally gone unremarked because attention has focused overwhelmingly on the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra. The spiritual teachings of the Gita have also overshadowed the advice on matters relevant to social and political governance in the Book of Peace (the longest section of the epic) and Book of Instruction, which follow immediately after the profound lamentation of the Stree Parva (Book of Women) at the end of the war.

It is important to note that while Vyasa emphasizes Kshatriya dharma in Krishna's counsel to Arjuna and the whole narrative hinges on a great war, the epic is solidly against the chest-thumping warrior code.

Understanding the Caste System

After the end of the Kurukshetra war Bhisma, the revered granduncle of the Bharata clan, lies impaled on a bed of arrows for an excruciating 58 days, waiting for the most auspicious time to die. It is the second dramatic freeze frame in the narrative. As the receding roar of armies underlined the urgency of Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on waging the battle of life, so Bhisma’s agony gives poignance and edge to the practical guidance he offers to Yudhisthira, the new Emperor. 

An issue he addresses at length and with the highest authority is the nature and significance of the caste system. Quoting no less a personage than Shiva, Bhisma says: “Brahma himself said during the process of creation” that the “distribution of human beings into the four orders dependent on birth is only for purposes of classification. Neither birth, nor purifying rites, nor learning, nor offspring, can be regarded as grounds for conferring the Twice Born status. Verily, conduct is the only ground.” Any “pious person “imbued with knowledge and science, purified from all dross, and fully conversant with the Vedas,” should be considered a Brahmin.” It is “by such acts that a Sudra may become a Brahmin refined of all stains and possessed of Vedic lore. … A Sudra who has purified his soul by pure deeds and subjugated all his senses deserves to be waited upon and served with reverence.” Contrarily, a Brahmin who does not conduct himself like one deserves no respect.

That was not just ideal theory; it was the lived reality of caste through most of Indian history, attested to by British observers before the great uprising of 1857 gave them a political incentive to lie. Monstuart Elphinstone’s 1841 History of India, written after many years in the country, noted that: “In the main, the Brahmin rules of life have been greatly relaxed. The castes below the Kshatriyas have now become extremely mixed and extremely numerous; a servile caste no longer exists. A man who loses caste is excluded both from all the privileges of citizenship and all the amenities of private life. As a rule, however, the recovery of caste by expiation is an easy matter.”

The report of the first census of British India in 1871 said of the Brahmin caste: “there are few trades in which some of its members are not engaged. So minute and endless are the ramifications of caste, that, when Mr. Prinsep took a census of Benares in 1834, no less than 107 distinct castes of Brahmins were found in that one city.” That was nothing new: Bhisma noted a long list of occupations that disqualified a Brahmin from officiating at a religious ceremony.

How did we get the idea that caste preserved pure bloodlines and was an iron system of class oppression? We got it from European theorists who judged Indian realities by their own historical experience of societies formed by layers of defeated tribes. The conclusion that conquering Brahmins imposed the caste system on the diversity of India is patently absurd if we consider that they are about 4 per cent of the population.

Caste conflicts as they now exist are a legacy of the 1871 census which, for the first time, enumerated  groups and presented the system's fluid realities in a Procrustean hierarchy. It set off a great and rancorous competition among groups that was without precedent because it was never before necessary: throughout Indian history, evident in such illustrious examples as Chandragupta Maurya and Shivaji, caste status was open to radical adjustment.

The hierarchical British ordering of castes was deliberately malignant; as Dharampal noted, two-thirds of royal families in pre-colonial India belonged to groups now classified as “Other Backward Castes.” That was nothing new; the Mahabharata mentions Eklavya not only as the low caste boy brutally treated by Drona but also as the Nishada king who led an army at Kurukshetra.

From the British perspective, downgrading the status of influential castes was effective psychological warfare and sound political strategy. It set off bitter inter-caste altercations at every level as groups jockeyed for status; and the issues were petty beyond belief because there was nothing substantive involved. The murderous quarrels we read about today over such things as an upturned mustache or a turban tied too high were as unknown in precolonial India as the Hindu-Muslim “riots” the British engineered.

The Indian Intellectual Tradition

The compilation of the Vedas by the Saptarishis, the formulation of the philosophy of the Upanishads, the didactic use of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, all indicate the extraordinary capacity of Indian society to understand and meet existential challenges. The intellectualism evident in the formation of Indian civilization came to rich fruition in the millennia that followed.

Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), perhaps the most articulate voice of the Indian Renaissance in the early 20th Century, noted in an essay in Arya the “strong intellectuality” of Indian tradition. It was “at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement … a seeking for the inner law and truth of things … of each human or cosmic activity.” Ancient India had assembled a “colossal literature” on “philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences.”

India’s curiosity had “embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing; all the 64 accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind.” Even on “such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants,” each topic “had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature.” Such intellectual labour had “no parallel before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science,” Aurobindo noted; all “that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished … with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf.”

He did not note two attendant marvels.

One was that when travel was slow, difficult and dangerous, India sustained across its vast distances an intellectual community that shared works, debated differences, and agreed on conceptual outcomes. Benares was the hub of that community; the Buddha came there from the foothills of the Himalayas, Adi Sankara traveled up from Kerala, Guru Nanak came from the Punjab and Raja Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda from Bengal. These are only some of the most prominent of the millions of Indian travelers who brought to life the rich cultural and intellectual life of a civilization all recognized as a unity spreading from the Himalayas to the seas lapping the peninsular spread of the country east, west and south. The role of masses of anonymous itinerants in shaping Indian society and carrying its impact to the rest of the world has been little noted. They took our cosmology, the Zero and differential calculus to China, Persia and Arabia (from where they spread to Europe). The Tamil gopuram traveled across the Himalayas to become the Pagoda of East Asia. The unarmed combat taught in the Kalaris of Kerala went with the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma to the Shaolin monastery in China, and the manual he wrote there disseminated the art throughout the region. 

The other marvel, unremarked not only by Aurobindo but by everyone I have ever read, is that Indian society and civilization were possible only because of the quality of the general mass of our people. Their reverence for the divine, their respect for learning and their generosity of spirit are the bedrock on which our leaders built. Those qualities allowed the Saptarishis to unify the tribes by compiling the Vedas; they assured the impact of the epic compositions of Valmiki and Vyasa; without them, Gandhi could not have succeeded. The fact that Indians for many millennia have accepted Rama as the ideal man and Krishna as the exemplar of wise leadership speaks to the quality of the devotee as much as to the objects of worship. The “Indian Dream,” even at the nadir of the Kali Yuga, has always been of God, and that has shaped our intellectual constructs, our expectations from life, our destiny.

The Nature of Reality

In the heyday of their arrogant power Europeans were given to dismissing Indians as fatalistic losers and contrasting our backwardness with their own world-beating "progress." Those attitudes persist even after the poisonous nature of that progress is widely known and hundreds of millions of people have paid with their lives in imperial contests for its temporary fruits. Many Indians continue to think that our traditions are a drag on progress, that bhakti is superstition, and that Western Science is a superior form of knowledge. There is an element of truth in those assessments to the extent that tradition is tied to ignorance, bhakti to scoundrels, and science to the healing arts. But beyond that, the European intellectual tradition is not superior or even equal to that of our own. To see why, we have to ask about the reasons for seeking knowledge and the nature of reality. Compare, for instance, the vision of the cosmos presented in the Mahabharata (the language has been thinly edited), with what Science has to say on the matter:

In the darkness there appeared the mighty golden egg Mahadivya containing the true light, the eternal Brahman, wonderful and inconceivable, present alike in all places, the invisible and subtle cause of entity and non-entity, progenitor of all things seen and unseen. From Brahman there emerged … after many eons the oceans, the heavens, the earth, the air, the sky, the points of the heavens, the years, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, days and nights, and all things known to man.

What is seen in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. At the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each other in the due order of their seasons. Thus continues perpetually to revolve in the world, without beginning and without end, this wheel of Time that causes the destruction of all things.

Science has validated part of that vision, finding evidence of Mahadivya in the Big Bang; but it has not ventured to express an opinion on what comes before the universe winks into existence and what will follow its extinction. That is because both Beginning and End are “Singularities,” beyond which basic scientific laws are presumed not to hold. Past those points, Science is blind.

On what basis does Hindu cosmology assert a continuity of cycles, each beginning with a Mahadiya? How does it venture the view that in between cycles Brahman continues to exist as unmoving Witness, holding incipient the explosive energy of the next Mahadivya? What significance should we attach to the overall Hindu concept?

To answer those questions we have to look at the nature of thought. Does each individual generate his or her own thoughts? Or are thoughts preexisting constructs that we merely perceive?

The entirety of Hindu tradition leans towards the latter. In our schema for training the intellect, the student phase is aimed at finding out what is known already and gaining the right orientation of spirit to allow the pursuit of knowledge, an essentially intuitive process. To be successful, the seeker must be in full control of his passions and have the mind in a state of fine concentration; then, prolonged tapasya (worship oriented to understanding), will reveal the truth about the specific object of inquiry. Put another way, the dedicated seeker with a finely trained intellect will be able to read the thought forms that constitute the universe. 

The evidence-based approach of Western Science is also oriented to discovering the laws that order the Universe; where it differs from India’s insight-based tradition is in motive and aim.

Science seeks understanding in order to manipulate and profit; the sages of India seek it to know the will and direction of the Universe.

Because of that difference, even when Science focuses on pure theory, it must proceed on hard evidence, quantifiable proof; and when the secrets of the universe are unlocked, the “applied Sciences” take over to turn erstwhile mysteries into profit or power. We can see the unavoidably demonic results in a world economy that is killing the planet's life systems, in the existence of nuclear and biological weapons that could end all life, in obscene inequalities of wealth and poverty, and the use of mass fear to control the world.

What this means is that our self-discovery in exiting from the Kali Yuga must be more than regaining memory of the past; it must look to the future and understand how to respond to the grim context of Western modernity; it must envision and move towards a better world.

*******

Part 10 will focus on what we can do to accelerate the end of the Kali Yuga

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. 

Understanding History: 4. The Future of the Past

Earlier sections of this series have dealt with the claims of colonial Europe to have a unique historical sensibility and the acceptance of that by Indian historians who have generally dismissed their own strong national historiography. This concluding section looks at why a globalizing world must reconstruct its past and how the Indian experience could be a model.

In two landmark essays on Indian history in 1912 and 1923 Rabindranath Tagore contrasted India’s peaceable diversity with homogenous Europe where “entire populations indulge in orgies of wholesale destruction unparalleled in ferocity in the history of the barbarian.”

When faced “with non-Western races in a close contact” Europeans never knew “any other solution of the problem but extermination or expulsion.”

Tagore noted that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata had recorded India’s achievement but beyond pointing to the interplay of the conservative (Brahmin) and dynamic (Kshatriya) elements within the caste system, he did not analyze how exactly India had melded its thousands of tribes into peaceful coexistence. To my knowledge, no one else has done so either.

In part the achievement was conceptual. The idea of a Universal Soul (Paramatma) provided a unifying umbrella for a wide variety of tribal beliefs and established with each of them a mutually legitimizing relationship.

On that shared spiritual foundation the Upanishad (discussion) tradition erected a structure of belief modeled on the easily observed seasonal cycles of Nature. It postulated the immortality of individual souls, all passing through many cycles of life and death in their evolution towards self-awareness and ultimately, the full enlightenment of merger with the Universal Soul.

As the individual's long passage to enlightenment occurred within the matrix of universal law (Dharma) and the moral causality of action (Karma), it emphasized individual responsibility and modulated the collectivist passions of the tribe. That allowed diverse groups to maintain their autonomy of custom and ceremony while settling into functional interdependence. The result was the caste system, a loosely hierarchical order that was essentially obedient to function, although its propagandists claimed it was divinely ordained.

A second aspect of the Indian achievement was the inspired story-telling of its two great Epics. They not only incorporated the complex teachings of the Upanishads into gripping and hugely popular stories, they spun all tribal beliefs into narratives reinforcing a core set of values.

Reworked into local storytelling traditions over many generations the Ramayana and Mahabharata shaped the common denominators of a culture that made India a nation unlike any known to the fiercely tribal nations of Europe.

The British in their efforts to maintain an always tenuous hold on India did much to subvert and poison the relations between its many groups. The caste system was a particular object of malign policy because it seemed to be the bulwark of the country’s resistance to religious conversion and manipulation. In that context it is interesting to note early 19th Century British assessments of the caste system.

Monstuart Elphinstone, who spent many years in the country, described the caste system as without rigor in his 1841 History of India. “The Brahmins claim that they alone now have preserved their lineage in its purity. The Rajputs, however, claim to be pure Kshatriyas. In the main, the Brahmin rules of life have been greatly relaxed. The castes below the Kshatriyas have now become extremely mixed and extremely numerous; a servile caste no longer exists. A man who loses caste is excluded both from all the privileges of citizenship and all the amenities of private life. As a rule, however, the recovery of caste by expiation is an easy matter.”

By the end of the century British writers were presenting the system as irretrievably rigid, ruled by iron custom set in place by the Brahmin caste to maintain its own superiority.
 
There was indeed an increase in the rigidity of the caste system in the 19th Century, but it had little to do with Brahmins: it was almost entirely the result of the first census of India (1871), which not only enumerated castes but presented them in hierarchical order.

The muddled British understanding of a complex and fluid system caused a great outcry across India but the damage could not be undone. Caste relations were embittered and subsequent British manipulations made things steadily worse. Thenceforth Indian reformers had to take in hand not only the many oppressive corruptions that had fractured caste relations over the millennia they had to wage a constant ideological battle with a Missionary-Bureaucratic combine seeking to divide and rule.

This background is important as we seek to move a swiftly globalizing world beyond the “clash of civilizations” model within which analysts working in the European tradition have conceptualized it. By further emphasizing the tribalism of religious faiths – the opposite of what traditional India achieved – they have made it virtually impossible to build a peaceful world.

In seeking to remedy this situation we must keep in mind the striking differences between the impacts of European and Indian historiography:

1. European historiography has bred unceasing war by accentuating the particularities of competing groups; far from modulating conflict the commonalities of religion have been a potent cause of violent intra-European intolerance and conflict.

2. The Indian approach to history shaped an overall understanding of the human condition that tamped down tribal hostilities and allowed widely diverse groups to coexist in peaceful interdependence.

In a world where hundreds of millions of people deride spiritual faith as delusion and billions frame their religious beliefs with missionary intolerance it will not be easy to construct a modern historiography based on the Indian model. However, the “sitting together” tradition of the Upanishads does offer a way to deal with existing differences.

It could probably be most effectively revived under the umbrella of UNESCO’s World History program. To begin with, a series of structured international discussions could bring into a common frame the different perceptions of the universe as metaphysical and our knowledge of it as phenomena; that is to say, the spiritual and the scientific.

Shorn of its usual shrill juvenile aspects, such a discussion would make clear that there is no fundamental conflict between the two approaches.

Science itself distinguishes between the particle and wave natures of phenomena (the province of chemistry and physics respectively).

Science now also takes it to be axiomatic that neither matter (particle) nor energy (wave) can be destroyed; they can only be converted into the other. This supports the concept of an indestructible soul. The existence of the genetic code further supports the idea of a unique and transmissible individuality.

Scientific acceptance of a "Big Bang" that initiated the phenomenal world and the inability to postulate what went before that “singularity" closely parallel religious views of Creation.

The similarities of Indian Spirituality and Western Science are even more pronounced if we consider that both are based on the existence of universal laws (Dharma) and inescapable causality (Karma).

The great difference between the scientific and spiritual approaches now lies in the concept of divinity: do we live in an accidental or purposeful universe?

Rather than try to resolve that issue at the outset, the new global historiography could make it a key object of study.

Other key aspects of exploration would be the dynamic relationship of many diverse fields of human endeavor. At present historians put political and economic developments within a common frame of reference; we must also bring into an interactive picture a range of other dimensions represented by literature, art, science, mathematics, the use of technology and experience of the sacred.

In such a multifaceted context events and trends will take on entirely new meanings and suggest commonalities and inter-relationships that are now hidden. Tribal consciousness will blur as such understanding grows. (Of course, elite groups that benefit from social dissension will have to be countered.)

The Indian experience suggests also that a moral perspective will emerge from a study of history: some trends will appear beneficial, others demonic in impact. And beyond that duality there is a reality unaffected by either.

The end of the Mahabharata illustrates that reality beyond human definitions by having Yudhisthira ascend to Heaven, where he finds all the evil people he battled on earth; his brothers, the virtuous Pandavas, are in Hell. It turns out to be an illusion and that is the final teaching of the Mahabharata: both Good and Evil are part of Maya, the delusive fog that cloaks the changeless Universal essence. Dispassionate awareness of that reality is the foundation of wisdom.

We can experience a modern approximation of that realization by noting the net results of the terrible period of Western colonialism and industrial civilization.

The genocides of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the intercontinental flows of indentured labor, the planting of settler colonies in the Americas and Africa, and the emergence of global economic and political systems, all have churned the human gene pool into an unprecedented unity.

The revolution in racial attitudes that Mahatma Gandhi initiated and Martin Luther King made global (ironically, with the color-blind help of the mass consumer market), has brought us to a world more unified in its humanity than ever before.

The poisonous nature of industrial society has focused our attention on humanity’s close and custodial relationship with Nature.

Pushed, pulled and prodded, the human species seems to have been prepared for a major evolutionary leap, a new age.

Sri Aurobindo, perhaps the greatest visionary India has produced, touched on the potential of such an age when he wrote of a “spiritual religion of humanity” as the hope of the future. He meant by that not “what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite,” but the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one” and “that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth.”

That would imply that the “human race and human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here … [and] a growing attempt to live out this knowledge … not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realization by the individual that only in the life of his fellow men is his own life complete.”

I think that passage sets out the overall aim for a modern global historiography.

Understanding History: 3. An Indian View of the Past

This is the third part of a series on Understanding History. Part 1 was on the colonial construct of history, and Part 2 on India's brainwashed historians. 

To see clearly the need for a uniquely Indian historiography we have to keep in mind the evolution of European concepts of history. From the time of the ancient Greeks to the middle of the 19th Century, it was a literary pursuit, of interest mainly to the elite interested in governance. In ancient Rome, it became moralistic in Plutarch’s Lives, overtly polemical under the impetus of missionary Christianity, nationalist in the 18th Century, and racist during the colonial period.

Until about 1850, history was the occupation of amateurs; then, under the influence of German scholars, it took on the pretensions of a science, with a methodology that aimed “not to please, nor to give practical maxims of conduct, nor to arouse the emotions, but knowledge pure and simple” (Langlois & Seignobos: Introduction to the Study of History, 1904). In practice, European historians have come nowhere near that ideal, but our professional historians have accepted their propaganda as fact and belittled India’s own understanding of history. To see what that is we have to look at how Indian tradition has shaped our view of the past over the millennia.

Ramayana & Mahabharata
Far from being poor historical material, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are key markers of the evolution of Indian society. The Ramayana, as noted in an earlier post, records and justifies the evolution of kingship, not as an imposition of force accepted in trembling and fear as in Hobbesian Europe but founded in the love of a virtuous and beloved king. Rama is not an all-powerful dictator but a ruler solicitous of popular opinion in all things.

The story of the Mahabharata is completely different in moral content. The personality of Krishna is suited for a time when the State is well established and dominated by power-hungry, immoral people. He is the primary strategist and tactician for the dispossessed and politically weak but virtuous Pandavas, their spiritual mentor even in the rush and press of battle. As the only purna swarup among the incarnations of Vishnu, Krishna is fully conscious of his divinity from the moment of birth, acutely aware of the need to confront and check the growth of evil as the baneful Kali Yuga approaches.

The revelation of his Universal form to Arjuna is to drive home the teaching that the workings of the Universe lie beyond human knowledge, that even if we do not like the hard choices before us, we must make them according to our best lights; in the worst of times we cannot despair and should not abandon our duty.

To be able to do that in an age dominated by ignorant passions of every kind, he advises detachment. “You have the right to action, not to the fruit thereof” he tells Arjuna. “True yoga is to be unmoved by defeat and loss, or wealth and victory.” He did not say (as Western commentators so often misinterpret), that we should deaden ourselves to feeling; only that our actions should be dispassionate.

All this is meaningful history. The rich content of our ancient literature, declared largely irrelevant in the frame of European historiography, is central to the Indian national narrative. That is so not because we assert that the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are literally true but because we define historical truth differently. It matters little whether Rama and Krishna were “historical figures.” They have lived in Indian hearts for thousands of years, and their stories illuminate who we are as a people; that gives them a reality far beyond that of any tinny chronology.

Their significance is not in the miraculous stories of the epics, but in the values they incarnate, and the moral guidance they offer. It says more about India than any library of Western “histories” that without benefit of church or clergy its people have made national treasures of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is their moral weight, more than anything else that has allowed India to endure the massive corruptions of the culturally amnesiac class brought to power by colonial rule.

In seeking a new historiography relevant not just to modern India but to a globalizing world it would be useful to look at how differently Europe and India have approached and achieved the primary goals of remembering the past and being guided by it. Perhaps the simplest way to do that would be to compare the hopes expressed in the introductory passages of the Histories of Herodotus and of the Mahabharata.

Herodotus was impelled to write by “the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds.” His gossipy stories are still read today, but mainly by scholars and history students, and few would attribute much “glory” to the people in his narrative.

The hopes expressed at the opening of the Mahabharata as the visiting Ugrasrava begins telling the hermits of the Naimisha forest of Vyasa’s great work, are markedly different from those of Herodotus: “As the sun dispels the darkness, so does the Bharata by its discourses on religion, profit, pleasure and final release, dispel the ignorance of men. As the full-moon by its mild light expands the buds of the water-lily, so this Purana has expanded the human intellect. By the lamp of history, which destroys the darkness of ignorance, the whole mansion of nature is properly and completely illuminated.”

The illuminating power of history is in line with that of the sun and moon. The Mahabharata is not just about a particular war but about “religion, profit, pleasure and final release” – that is to say, all of life. While the histories of Herodotus gather dust on bookshelves, Vyasa’s story is known in every village in India and far afield; its heroes are remembered fondly in the names of children throughout the land, and its teachings taken to heart by unschooled peasants, scholars and saints.

The Mahabharata has kept a nation of great diversity in touch with its essential cultural unity and instructed countless generations on what is to be valued in life, and what is without worth. This is what history is supposed to do. As a remembrance of the past that puts the present in proper perspective the Mahabharata is unmatched by any other work. Western historiography with its malleable truths and tribal loyalties has produced nothing remotely comparable.

That the Mahabharata is a sophisticated work of national, moral and philosophical guidance is evident at many places in the narrative. Consider, for example, the origin and nature of the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Although always referred to as “cousins,” the two sets of siblings, ostensibly the sons of the blind Dhrithirashtra and his younger brother Pandu “the pale,” are unrelated by blood.

The sons of Pandu, who is cursed to die instantly if he should give way to carnal desire, are actually fathered by different gods invoked by his two wives. Dharma, the personification of universal law fathers the first-born Yudhisthira. Maruti the Wind begets Bhima of immense strength. Indra the warrior god of thunder and storm is the father of Arjuna, the perfect warrior. The twin Aswins, skilled in the arts and husbandry that support life, are the parents of Nakula and Sahadeva.

Together, they represent the essential strengths of any civilization: Law, Power, the capacity for war and the skills for peace. India is united not by its bloodlines but by the indissoluble bonds of a brotherhood of very mixed parentage; that theme is further emphasized in the love of the Pandavas of one shared wife who can be seen without taxing the imagination as the beautiful land to which all are wedded.

The Kauravas are also not the natural sons of the blind Dhritrashtra. His wife Gandhari (from Gandhara, modern Afghanistan), is childless and becomes pregnant only through the magical intercession of Vyasa (a literary device he uses throughout the Mahabharata to signal didactic intent). Her pregnancy is abnormally prolonged, and as it draws past the second year she hears of the birth of Pandu’s first son and, losing patience, induces birth. What emerges from her womb is not a baby but a horrible ball of flesh, hard as iron. Vyasa returns to remonstrate with her. If she had not lost patience her offspring would have been of unrivaled splendour.

However, all is not lost: he cuts up the ball of flesh into a hundred and one pieces, putting each in a separate jar. After two years of incubation the Kauravas emerge from the jars, all boys except for the youngest; they seem normal, even splendid, but are demonic by nature. As the Pandavas exemplify the attributes of a healthy society, the Kauravas illustrate the monstrous consequences of human over-reaching and incontinence.

Dhrithrashtra’s blindness and Gandhari’s decision on her wedding day to blindfold herself for life establish a theme Vyasa returns to repeatedly in his long narrative: Evil is rooted in the incapacity or willful refusal to see reality. Every fateful choice the Kauravas make as they spiral down to doom illustrates the delusive power of egotism, greed, anger, hate and envy. No Satan plots their downfall, for Hinduism has no such entity; their fate is sealed by the failure to see the kinship of all things underlying the world’s vast differentiation; without spiritual cognition, they lack compassion, and thus understanding.

These value judgments indicate a factor of central importance in Vyasa’s story: the course of human affairs is not accidental. The immutable laws that govern the universe extend into human conduct and our actions propel destiny. In telling of the origins and development of the conflicts that culminate in the killing field of Kurukshetra, Vyasa shows repeatedly how bad karma has insidious and long-term effects.

Pandu brings on his curse because he shoots a deer in the act of coupling. Karna is resplendent like his father the Sun god and a greater warrior than Arjuna; but he accidentally kills a poor man’s only sustenance, a cow, and invites the curse that disables him at a critical point in battle and causes his death. The matchless warrior Bhisma inadvertently ruins the life of a princess he kidnaps according to the Kshatriya code, and her revenge comes after her death and rebirth as the effeminate Sikhandin, against whom he will not defend himself.

The repercussions that flow from ill-considered actions are clothed as curses, but they are manifestly the ineluctable working out of karma. The Bharata war itself is a karmic landmark, for it occurred just before the world entered the Kali Yuga, the most benighted of the four-phase cycle of the moral universe.

The lesson of the whole of Vyasa's work is that when bad times come, there is nothing to do but accept it, knowing that it is karma at work. The best response is to create good karma, oppose evil with good, understand hatred, fight it with love.

In part 4: constructing a karmic history for the globalized world.

Corruption in India-3

A cardinal aspect of corruption in Indian society, which the Lokpal debate has studiously avoided, is the divisive, oppressive and nationally enfeebling caste system. Perhaps one reason for its absence from public debate is that while the system is widely condemned, it is little understood.

Caste has been the focus of reform efforts for some five centuries, beginning with the Bhakti Poets, most significantly Kabir (1440-1518) and Guru Nanak (1469-1539). Those efforts suffered a severe setback under British colonial rule which could be sustained only by Indian disunity. The British sought to strengthen caste divisions and made it the subject of relentless propaganda aimed at inflaming internecine tensions.

The British invented a prehistoric “Aryan” invasion from Europe that not only sought to legitimize their rule and lay European claim to the origins of Vedic civilization, but presented the Brahmins – the primary Hindu bulwark against religious conversion – as the oppressors of other groups constituting some 95 per cent of the population. At the opposite extreme, British sanitary arrangements imposed the task of “nightsoil collection” on the lowliest groups, pushing them deeper into pariah status.

With the census of 1871 the British also introduced into the traditionally fluid arrangements of caste an unprecedented rigidity. The census set down in cold print what the British believed to be India’s caste hierarchy; it caused a great uproar all over the country, for it obliterated the grey areas that allowed castes to move up when opportunities arose. This mischief was intended, for their own historians had noted the fluidity of the system and how it had benefited two of the greatest figures of Indian history, Ashoka and Shivaji. Indeed, a third of the country’s ruling families from which the British wrested control of the country belonged to castes the census deemed low (and now fall in the category of OBC -- Other Backward Castes).

Indian reform efforts sharpened under British rule, most significantly in the movements led by Gandhi and Ambedkar. The latter, as the primary architect of India’s republican constitution, gave formal shape to the vision of a society without caste discrimination. However, progress towards that ideal has been slow. Electoral politics emphasizing caste-based “vote banks” energized divisions, and it has taken more than a generation for a counter-trend to emerge in the unifying logic of shared development and improved governance.

Today, with the corruptions of the system still raw and oppressive to many, there is a clear need to energize reform but Indian social activists seem to be at a loss on how to proceed. Part of the problem is conceptual, for the confusions spread during the colonial era still prevail, kept alive by a steady flow of “histories of India” from British authors who command a much larger audience than any Indian writer because they are published by the handful of foreign companies that dominate the Indian book market. (Not that Indian writers have set forth a particularly different perspective; our mainstream and “Left” historians are still very much in thrall to the West; those on the “Right” tend to be Hindutva fantasists.)

Meanwhile, modern research, especially genetic mapping, has revealed much that is new about the origin and evolution of the caste system. In September 2009, Nature published the findings of an Indian-American research project that studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. It found, as one of the senior researchers told the Press, that “it is impossible to distinguish castes from tribes” and that the available evidence supported “the view that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society.”

The sociological implications of that discovery are significant. When the tribal groups that began migrating out of Africa some 70,000 years ago collected in India, they did not settle into eternal conflict as happened elsewhere. Indian society evolved by allowing groups to keep their internal autonomy while fitting them into a pattern of functional interdependence.

The development of a common worldview and shared philosophy was taken up by the Upanishads (literally, to speak sitting together); we would call them “conferences” today, perhaps even “town meetings.” The concepts of a Universal Spirit and the individual soul, of Universal Moral Law (Dharma) and the inescapable Law of Causality (Karma), all emerged from discussions among the best and brightest of Indian society; they were rational concepts that everyone could accept, and served as an umbrella for all manner of tribal customs and beliefs. The amalgamation of those beliefs under that umbrella laid the foundation of what is now “Hinduism” – the “Sanatana Dharma” (the Eternal Law) at the philosophical level, supported by the hydra-headed formations of tribal worship at the popular level.

The decentralized social system that emerged was preeminently tolerant of differences. Although tribal groups fell into the four universal occupations – teachers, warriors, merchants and manual workers – the divisions and many subdivisions allowed great flexibility. There was also a pragmatic acceptance of intercaste liaisons. The Puranas discuss the matter at numerous points and there is mention of entire castes composed of the progeny of such mixing. Indians today share a strong genetic commonality: the 2009 study that showed the tribal origin of castes provided conclusive proof of it. The proportion of shared genes within the Indian population ranges from 49 to 80 per cent in different parts of the country.

Such mixing would appear impossible given the general ban on inter-caste marriages, and the especially strong Brahmin emphasis on the purity of bloodlines. However, we must take into account that in social relationships theory and fact cannot be immutably wedded; and that the record-keeping Brahmin caste had ample incentive and opportunity to present itself as superior and apart. 

The tribal origin of caste explains its persistence. For the group and for the individual, it had survival value, not only in the wilderness from which they emerged but in the multi-tribal grouping of Indian society: amidst its bewildering diversity the caste offered the security of shared custom and ceremony, of peerage and order.

The Ramayana celebrated the emergence of a unitary state out of tribal federalism: Rama is the God-King next door, the quintessential family man, a dutiful son, loving husband, loyal brother, kind even to his heartless aunt who engineers his exile from Ayodhya. Everyone, high and low, can identify with him, gain access. The gods in Indra’s heaven applaud as he sits on equal terms with a lowly forest dweller. Lakshman protests when a poor woman offers the prince fruit she has bitten into to make sure it is sweet, but Rama checks him: she acts out of love.

Rama is so conscious of democratic constraints that he even sends away his beloved wife Sita when the citizens of Ayodhya express suspicions about her pregnancy soon after return from Ravana's captivity. The message that "Ramrajya," the ideal State, is marked above all by the integrity of the king, is a constant theme of the epic. Rama accepts 14 years of privation in exile to uphold the sanctity of the king’s pledge, the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of those he rules.

By the time of the Mahabharata, the incorruptible ideal of Ramrajya is long gone; the State is in the hands of evil power-hungry men who drive the country into the fratricidal war that augurs the onset of the Kali Yuga, the dark immoral age in which we now live. In such an age, caste has become merely a tool of narrow-minded sectarian politics, a means for the corrupt to manipulate the group for personal profit.

If we are to continue the process of social renewal that began half a millennium ago, social reformers must address this situation head-on. Denunciation and agitation are not enough; they must provide an alternative to the identity and security offered (even if only notionally) by caste. Perhaps this could be done by organizing social security along new functional lines or at the level of communities, in effect, creating new “tribes” that look after their own, weaning loyalty away from the obsolete shells of caste that benefit only a manipulative elite.

Such an approach will have to deal with the massive trend towards corrupt elite control powered by corporate globalization. That will be the subject of the next post.