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INTRODUCTION
These essays have one
feature in common, namely that they are based upon the collation of field-
work with literary evidence. Indian critics whose patriotism outstrips
their grasp of reality are sure to express annoyance or derision at the
misplaced emphasis. Why should anyone ignore the beautiful lily of Indian
philosophy in order to concentrate on the dismal swamp of popular
superstition? That is precisely the point. Anyone with aesthetic sense can
enjoy the beauty of the lily; it takes a considerable scientific effort to discover
the physiological process whereby the lily grew out of the mud and filth.
This process of
development cannot be understood by mere study of the philosophic systems
formerly current in India. The great Samkara, the Buddhists who preceded
him, and the Vaisnavas who followed, managed to separate a higher from a
lower plane of relief. The higher level was purely ideal and theological,
the region where the human spirit could soar to ineffable heights of
fancied perfection. The common herd might wallow in their day-to-day ritual
malpractices, upon the lower level. The idealist philosopher was himself
excused for joining them in the ritual observances as long as his theory
was undefiled by any contact with reality. Only ideas and ideals existed
from eternity, whereas the mundane life really did not exist at all on the
plane that mattered.
1. Primitive
elements survive in all religious beliefs shared by any considerable number
of people. The prayer "Give us this day our daily bread" is
substantial enough to the greater part of the world's population. It could
not have originated before the late Stone Age, for nothing like bread was
known earlier. The idea of prayer to God the Father could also not have
been conceived earlier than the pastoral, in the food-gathering period when
the Mother Goddess was predominant. The stone-age origin of the daily
prayer does no fundamental damage to Christian pride. It is as easy to move
in the opposite direction with Rousseau and the romanticists as it is to
sneer at primitive superstition. They believed that man in the state nature
had been free from the various misguided beliefs and ignoble actions of
literate society. This does not need a Frazer or a Malinowski to disprove
it. Our present task is to trace the primitive roots of some Indian myths
and rituals that survived the beginning of civilization and indeed survive
to this day. This is not too difficult in a country where contemporary
society is composed of elements that preserve the indelible marks of almost
every historical stage. The neglect of such an analysis leads to a
ridiculous distortion of Indian history and to a misunderstanding of Indian
culture, not compensated by subtle theology or the boasts of having risen
above crass materialism.
The religious observances
of the various human groups in India, particularly those that are lowest in
the social, cultural and economic scale, show roughly the order in which
the particular groups were enrolled into a greater, productive society. In
a general way this is true of many higher strata as well. The fossilized
and stratified remnants of primitive observances, combined with caste and
religion, hold a particular group together. The observances also located
the coherent group relatively to others within a highly composite society.
Change of economic status is reflected in, and acted till recently through
some corresponding transformation in caste; sometimes by change in cult as
well. One of the main problems for consideration is: Why is a fusion of
cults sometimes possible and why do cults stubbornly refuse to merge on
other occasions? Naturally, this question cannot be answered on the
"highest plane" of Samkara and Ramanuja, for it simply does not
exist on that level. Cults do not clash by themselves. It is the people who
observe the cults that find it impossible to come to terms. The followers
of Samkara and Ramanuja quarreled bitterly on the worldly plane. It is very
doubtful that they could have justified physical violence by the subtle
theological differences between their two systems. The theological
subtleties which distinguish the two schools are difficult enough to cause
any number of headaches; but there seems to be nothing in either system as
expounded by its great acarya which should have led to the breaking
of heads.
Siva grew out of
rather primitive and anionic cult-stones along several parallel tracks,
into a sublimated highest god for some people. At one stage his equivalent
came into more or less violent conflict with the various mother-goddesses
who had previously been the senior deities. We find a naked three- faced
god on Mohenjodaro seals (fig. 1) who might easily be a prototype of the modern Siva;
but that deity wears buffalo horns on his head- dress. It cannot be a mere
accident that the pastoral buffalo-god Mhasoba is also identified with the
asura whom the goddess Parvati crushes to regain her title
Mahisasura-mardini (fig 2). We shall see in one of the
present essays that Parvati as Yogesvari is at times married to an
equivalent of Mhasoba who begins to resemble a diluted form of
Siva-Bhairava. This will cast some light upon the Kalighat painting and
other icons where Parvati as Kali tramples (fig. 3) upon Siva's prostrate body, presumably his corpse;
that he comes to life again under her vivifying tread is obviously a
mitigating addition to the undeniable conflict. Siva managed to remain united
to Parvati in marriage, though she is supposed later to have stripped him
of everything at a game of dice. His entourage (fig. 4) has the sacred, bull Nandi, the cobra, goblins of
various sorts, an elephant- headed son Ganesa, another (Skanda) with six
heads. It might be noted that the son of Parvati's body was not of Siva's,
and he cut off the child's head, later replaced by that of an elephant in
the myth. On the other hand, Skanda was born of Siva's seed, but not of
Parvati's womb. This complex iconography and ridiculously complicated myth
cannot be explained by Siva's elevation to the highest abstract principle.
<Fig. 4>
1. From an 18th
century painting (Peshwa period) at wai. The main figures are Siva,
Ganesha, Parvati, Skanda. The attendants, originally goblins, have become
courtiers and flunkeys. On the steps are Siva's bull (Nandi) and Ganesha's
rat; Skanda's vahana, the peacock, is not represented.
If, however, we note
that Siva is a cosmic dancer (fig. 5), that a dance by the tribal medicine man or witch
doctor is essential in most primitive fertility rites, the way to an
explanation seems clear. We have only to compare the lce-age Chamois-masked
dancer of Les Trois Freres (fig. 6) I or the French stone-age 'diablotins,' with the
medieval dancing Siva-Nataraja and the buffalo-horned lndus Siva. The
elephant- headed Ganesha also appears as a dancer, nrtta-ganesa (fig. 7) at times; has he no connection whatever with the
European ice-age dancer (fig.8) who wears a mammoth mask as head-dress, and
imitates the mammoth's tusks with his arms? Would not such dancers explain
the fact that Ganesa is supposed to have just one tusk; the Indian tribal
dancer's two arms would not have sufficed to imitate the trunk and both tusks
simultanously. The monkey-faced Hanuman, depicted carrying a mountain in
one hand, leaps about (fig. 9) like any vigorous dancing
savage. The meaning of Hanuman is "with a chin"- one human
anatomical feature not possessed by any monkey; Hanuman dancers who
leap high under divine inspiration are still a feature of South Konkan holi
spring festivals. Those who feel ennobled by thinking of Siva as the
fundamental cosmic principle, and his dance as the activating essence of
the whole universe of matter, movement, thought and action have no reason
to feel offended. They have tried to rise above the primitive man's
circumscribed ideology without discarding his imagery.
2. Many other parts
of the world passed through parallel stages. This includes Europe and
pre-conquest America; contemporary Africa preserves many beliefs that
enable us to restore the Indian past. Western history shows far greater
stress upon systematic violence in making the change. As Robert Graves put
it in his White Goddess :
Swordsman of the
narrow lips,
Narrow hips and murderous mind
Fenced with chariots and ships,
By your joculators hailed
The mailed wonder of mankind,
Far to westward have you sailed.
You who, capped
with lunar gold
Like an old and savage dunce,
Let the central hearth go cold,
Grinned, and left us here your sword
Warden of sick fields that once
Sprouted of their own accord.
This is entirely in
the European cultural and literary tradition based upon prowess and --later--
love, or to put it crudely: violence and sex. In contrast, Indian tradition
combines religion with love (or sex with superstition). The Iliad, like
the Mahanharata, is primarily an epic of warfare. In the extant Mahabharata,
the main thread of the narrative is lost in minor narratives (upakhylina)
which drown the war story in priestly cant or philsophic lore. The work
as it now exists is a formless, illogical mass. It is not that the Greek
heroes expressed no philosophy. Achilles says to Priam's defenceless son,
caught loitering in a vineyard :
Far better than
thou was Patroclus; he could not choose but die !
Seest not thou how goodly and fair
and tall am I ?
A princely father begat me, a
goddess mother bore ;
Yet my death and the o'ermastering
doom are hard by the door.
It shall hap in the dawn or the
eventide or at the noon of the day
That someone shall take my life,
even mjne, in the midst of the fray.
A clear philosophy,
without pity, fear or hesitation, which enabled Achilles to cut the innocent
stripling's throat calmly. But it does not seem to fit into the Indian
tradition, nor be the way in which the Indian warrior class saw, itself,
whatever evil practices were actually the usage of Indian warfare. The way
was clear in Europe to Beowulf, the hero who smote ever too hard for
the metal of his own sword. The Chanson de Roland loses its military
history in legend, but it is hardly to Christianity what the Mbh with
its Bhagavad-Gitia is to Hinduism. Horatius at the bridge, Grettir
the Strong, Hereward the Wake, Bussy d' Amboise are matched by Indian epic
figures like Karna, Bhiema, Abhimanyu; but the treatment differs beyond
comparison. The physical bravery of the European characters stands out as
for its own sake, without identification with the immense forces of Good
and Evil whereby the Indian war- hero mitigate the fundamental brutality of
warfare to become purely symbolic. With the Carolingian cycle, a new
element of romance was added, at the end of the feudal period.
Correspondingly, the famous Raso sagas of Rajasthan combine
lovemaking with prowess. But how great the difference! The Mahabharata imposed
its form and its formlessness even upon the Prthvi-raja-raso. For
the rest, those who deplore the brutal western tradition might briefly
consider the undeniable fact that Hellenic sati vanished at the dawn
of Greek history, whereas the practice of burning widows alive really
gained its gruesome force in India in medieval and feudal times. Everything
regarded as the best in India's philosophy was then available, but the
applications left something to be desired.
Achilles was a real
person of the bronze age in Greece, whether or not he performed any of the
Homeric feats. His saga is not good history, though history might
occasionally peep through isolated battle episodes of the chronicles. Two
examples suffice. Earl Simon de Montfort, cornered on a raw English day in
August 1265, saw the troops of prince Edward advance in compact order and
knew that his time had run out. "How well the churls come on",
said he in unwilling admiration; and then, bitterly, "It was from me
they learnt it." This is a personal tragedy, which discloses nothing
of underlying history. The speaker had founded Parliament, and his death
was to show that the same parliament would not serve to make the King of
England a puppet in the hands of his barons; but we have to find this out
for ourselves from other sources. The last words of Epameinondas serve us
better. Struck down in the heat of the battle of Mantineia at the very
moment of a signal victory, he tried to entrust the conduct of the
remaining operations to another. "Call Deiophantus" was the
order, answered by "He has fallen in the battle". "Call
Iolaidas"; "He too has fallen in the battle". The general
said with his dying breath, "Then you must make your peace with the
enemy", pulled the fatal barb out of his chest and expired while
friend and foe stood paralysed on the battlefield. There was no third
person in the entire Boiotian army who could direct the fairly simple,
tactical operation of mopping up. These last words are perhaps the most
pathetic in the whole of Greek history, for they sum up the basic tragedy
of the tiny city-states that could neither co-exist in peace nor combine
into sufficiently large groups to resist external aggression. The days when
a Macedonian phalanx would annihilate the Theban army in one battle, the
reduced legions of Sylla rage through Hellas like a tornado, and Mummius
stamp Corinth out almost as a contemptuous gesture, are all reflected in
the dying words.
3. Parallels between
European Ice-Age drawings and modern Indian representations of certain
deities need not imply a direct line of descent. Without discussing any of
the numerous diffusionist theses, I merely say that people who live by
similar methods and techniques often produce similar cults, just as they
produce similar artifacts of stone. For example, we have more than one
'sketching sheet' which served in Auringnacian France (fig. 10) as model from which cave artists drew full-sized
animals faithfully. The exact duplication was undoubtedly an act of faith
to promote fertility or success in hunting. The ritual value of duplication
continues to later times when a stamp seal about the size of the
'sketch-sheet', generally with an animal as its main figure, was used in
the Indus valley. Stamping the seal upon clay had originally some religious
significance. Cultic cylinder seals have been discovered in Mesopotamia
while many Indus sealings show no impression upon the underside which might
have indicated contact with any package of merchandise. Sealing could
protect a parcel at the earliest stages only by imposing a generally
understood religious taboo. It took a considerable development of society
before the seal became just a signature and its intact condition a sign
that the package had not been tampered with.
Some of these
sketch-sheets economize by placing many sketches on a single pebble
(fig. 11). The obvious development
here would be to merge these figures into various fanciful hybrids and
chimeras. An added incentive must have been supplied by the merger of human
groups with different totems. This would account for the man-tiger on an
Indus seal (fig. 12), the logical ancestor of
the man-lion (Narasimha) incarnation of Visnu (fig. 1.8). There are many such hybrids in Harappan and
Mohenjodaro seals, so that the idea of iconic fusion was quite
familiar. The southern e!ephant- lion (Yali) combination goes back
to such ancient pictorial hybridization. Its religious significance is hidden
under the modern explanation in Tamil- Nad that the Narasimha incarnation
got out of hand, so that Visnu had to incarnate himself as a Yali to subdue
his own religious monster form! The gaja- vrabha, or at least a
bull-elephant chimaera was noted on a Jamdet Nasr seal by H. Frankfort.* It
provides important evidence of intimate contact at a very early date
between Mesopotamian and Indus cultures, perhaps even a common stratum of
people. To my mind, the ardha-narisvara (fig. 13) utilize this technique of hybridization to merge
two deities, so that simultaneous reverence could be and had to be offered
to both. The marriage of Siva to Parvati was unquestionably a later event,
when human marriage had become a high ceremonial in the particular society
and the pairing marriage was generally recognized. This type of explanation
avoids Euhemeristic rationalization as well as the mystic's or theologian's
contempt for reality.
The reluctance to
admit the primitive roots of Indian religious philosophy and to face the
survival of primitive belief in the country may stem in part from the
normal reaction of the Indian intellectual to the long humiliation of a
repressed colonial life which still remains a vividly unpleasant memory.
The real difficulty, however lies in the failure to understand that
primitive observances served a totally different purpose under the
conditions when they first came into general use. The Holi spring festival,
now regarded by law and public opinion as obscene, licentious and depraved
can be traced to remotest savagery. Yet, at the time when food gathering
was the norm, with a most uncertain supply of food and meagre diet, a
considerable stimulus was necessary for procreation. Obscenity was then
essential in order to perpetuate the species. But the original saturnalia
was never depraved, as it became inevitably when agriculture meant heavy
labour as well as regular nourishment, with a corresponding change in man's
appetites and sexual function. Similarly, the Upanisadic riddles which
display so much mysticism and philosophy are only a step above the deadly
riddles asked by yaksas of strangers at sacred springs. The wrong
answer in the earlier days meant ritual sacrifice of the intruder. That such
yaksas or their human representatives were a real menace is attested
by the Pali canon. The Pancaka- nipala of the Amguttara- Nikaya says
that contemporary Madhuta (Mathum) presented five ordeals to the wandering
almsman: poorly surfaced roads, excessive dust, fierce dogs, cruel yaksas
and scarcity of alms. All five items must have been painfully real to
almsmen who represented the food gatherers' tradition, not the helplessness
of modem beggars. Finally, those who dislike my interpretation of the
totemic monkey-dancer Hanuman might ponder upon the curious ancestry
claimed by certain Kanarese chieftains of the 10-12th centuries. Though any
number of higher genealogies were to be had from Puranas, these worthies
insisted; upon claiming descent from the Ramayana monkey-king Bali (EI
13. 186; Ep. Carn. 4. Yl. 25; IA 1901. 110,260). Surely,
primitive superstition was not so very much worse than the economic
philosophy of a modem affluent society which destroys surplus grain and
potatoes in a hungry world, or the political phillosophy which glorifies
the ultimate thermonuclear deterrent.
It is not the
purpose of these essays to judge but to analyse in as far as the essayist's
knowledge suffices for the purpose. It seems to me that a great deal more
in the way of field work is needed in every part of the country before we
can begin to theorize. However imperfect, the beginning is made here.
The fourth chapter
of this book has not been published elsewhere. The new discoveries of
pierced microliths, the Karha- Bhima track, megaliths of the Poona
district, and radio- carbon dating of Buddhist caves are announced here for
the first time. The necessary fieldwork was made possible by the
cooperation of many. In particular, D. S. Chavda and V. N Sisodia brought
badly needed transport within my means; we were joined in the field B. P.
Franklin, G. Sontheimer, S. Takahara, and T. Yamazaki. Nothing could have
been accomplished without the information willingly supplied by innumerable
villagers who must remain anonymous. If, some day, an expedition with motor
caravans, photographic gadgets, tape recorders, mobile laboratories,
sondage apparatus and helicopter-guided surveying equipment takes the
field-and the Indian peasant still exists-much more information could be
extracted from the same region.
The rest of the book
consists of essays slightly modified for re-publication. Chapter I appeared
in Enquiry 2 (1959); in revised form, JESHO vol. iv, 1000.
Chap. II: Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay, vol. 27, 1951,
pp. 1-30; with additions and illustrations in Indian Studies: Past &
Present, vol. I, no.1, Oct. 1959, pp. 141-175. Chapter III. JRAS 1960.
pp. 17-31 and 135-144. Chap. V: the Journal of the University of
Bombay, 1947, vo xv. pt. 4, pp. 63-78. My thanks are due to the editors of
these journals. The illustrations were mostly prepared by my daughter Meera
Kosambi. Readers will recognize my debt to B. Malinowski, H. Obermaier, H.
Breuil and H. Frankfort, among other giants; but most than any other, to K.
Marx.
*Henri Frankfort : Cylinder Seals
(New York. 1939. plate VI. c).
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