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Social and
Economic Aspects of the BHAGAVAD-GITA
Note: The links in this page do not work. I will be
updating them later- 1st
July 2006
I
The Bhagavad-Gita, 'Song of the Blessed One", forms
part of the great Indian epic Mahabharata (1). Its 18 adhyaya chapters
contain the report by Sanjaya of a dialogue between the Pandava hero Arjuna
and his Yadu Charioteer Krsna, the eighth incarnation of Visnu. The actual
fighting is about to begin when Arjuna feels revulsion at the leading part
which he must play in the impending slaughter of cousins and kinsmen. The
exhortations of Lord Krisa answer every doubt through a complete
philosophical cycle, till Arjuna is ready to bend his whole mind, no longer
divided against itself, to the great killing. The Gita has attracted minds
of bents entirely different from each other and from that of Arjuna. Each
has interpreted the supposedly divine words so differently from all the
others that the original seems far more suited to raise doubts and to split
a personality than to heal an inner division. Any moral philosophy which
managed to receive so many variant interpretations from minds developed in
widely different types of society must be highly equivocal. No question
remains of its basic validity if the meaning be so flexible. Yet the book
has had its uses.
If a Mahabharata war had actually been fought on the scale
reported, nearly five million fighting men killed each other in an 18-day
battle between Delhi and Thanesar; about 130,000
chariots (with their horses), an equal number of elephants and thrice that
many riding horses were deployed. This means at least as many
camp-followers and attendants as fighters. A host of this size could not be
supplied without a total population of 200 millions, which India did not attain till the British
period, and could not have reached without plentiful and cheap iron and
steel for ploughshares and farmers' tools. Iron was certainly not available
in any quantity to Indian peasants before the 6th century BC. The
greatest army camp credibly reported was of 400,000 men under Chandragupta
Maurya, who commanded the surplus of the newly developed Gangetic basin.
The terms patti, gulma etc., given as tactical units in the M'bh did
not acquire that meaning till after the Mauryans. The heroes fought with bows
and arrows from their chariots, as if the numerous cavalry did not exist;
but cavalry which appeared comparatively late in ancient Indian warfare,
made the fighting chariots obsolete as was proved by Alexander in the Punjab.
The epic began, like the early Homeric chants, as a series of
lays sung at the court of the conquerors. The lament was thinly veiled,
presumably by irony; the defeated Kurus survived in legend (e.g. the
Kuru-dhamma-jataka) as unsurpassable in rectitude and nobility of
character. Krsna-Narayana had no role to play even in the first connected
epic narrative. Should the reader doubt all this, let him read the final
cantos of the extant M'bh. The Pandavas come in the end to
disgraceful old age, and unattended death in the wilderness. Their
opponents are admitted to heaven as of right, but the heroes are only
transferred there from the tortures of hell, after a long and stubborn
effort by the eldest brother Yudhisthira. It strikes even the most casual
eye that this is still the older heaven of Indra and Yama; Krsna-Narayana
is not its dominant figure, but a palpable and trifling insertion in a
corner.
Those legendary Utopians, the pure and unconquerable Uttara-Kurus
of the Digha- Nikaya (DN 32) and the Aitareya Brahmana (AB 8.14;
8.23) are not to be confused with the Kurus who survived in historical
times near Delhi-Meerut. The Buddha preached several of his sermons at the
settlement Kammasa-damma in Kuru- land (Majjhima Nikoya 10; 75; 106)
while their capital seems to have been at Thullakotthita (MN 82),
the seat of the nameless petty tribal Kuru chief, presumably descended from
the Pandava conquerors whom the epic was to inflate beyond all limits. This
negligible kingdom either faded away or was among the tribal groups
systematically destroyed by the Magadhan emperor Mahlapadma Nanda, a few
years before Alexander's raid into the Punjab. The memory, however,
remains- as of a tribe, but not a full- fledged kingdom with a class
structure in the eleventh book of the Arthasastra, along with similar
oligarchies like the Licchavis and the Mallas known to have been destroyed
about 475 BC. As for Narayana, it might be noted here that the
famous benedictory initial stanza Narayanam namaskrtya, which would
make the whole of the extant M'bh into a Vaisnava document, was
stripped off by V. S. Sukthankar's text-criticism in 1933 as a late
forgery.
1. FOR WHAT CLASS
We know that the Gita exercised a profound influence upon
Mahatma Gandhi B. G. Tilak, the 13th century Maharashtrian reformer Jnanesvar,
the earlier Vaisnava Acarya Ramanuja, and still earlier Samkara.
Though both fought hard in the cause of India's liberation from British
rule, Tilak and the Mahatma certainly did not draw concordant guidance for
action from the Gita. Aurobindo Ghose renounced the struggle
for India's freedom to concentrate
upon study of the Gita. Lokamanya Tilak knew the Jnanesvari comment,
but his Gita-rahasa is far from being based upon the earlier work.
Jnanesvar himself did not paraphrase Samkara on the Gita, nor does
his very free interpretation follow Ramanuja; tradition ascribes to him
membership of the rather fantastic natha
sect. Ramanuja's Vaisnavism laid a secure foundation for the acrid
controversy with the earlier followers of Siva who came into prominence
with the great Samkara. But then, why did Samkara also turn to the Bhagavad-gita?
What common need did these outstanding thinkers have that was at
the same time not felt by ordinary people, even of their own class? They
all belonged to the leisurely class of what, for lack of a better term, may
be called Hindus. The consequent bias must not be ignored, for the great
comparable poet-teachers from the common people did very well without the Gita.
Kabir, the Banaras weaver, had both Muslim and Hindu followers for his
plain yet profound teaching. Tukaram knew the Gita through the Jnanesvari,
but worshipped Visnu in his own way by meditation upon God and
contemporary society in the ancient caves (Buddhist and natural) near the
junction of the Indrayani and Pauna rivers. Neither Jayadeva's Gita-
govinda, so musical and supremely beautiful a literary effort, (charged
with the love and mystery of Krsna's cult) nor the Visnuite reforms of
Caitanya that swept the peasantry of Bengal off its feet were founded on the
rock of the Gita. I have yet to hear that the heterogeneous
collection which forms the Sikh canon owes anything substantial directly to
the Gita, though it preserves verses due to Jayadeva, and the
Maharashtrian Namdev. Jnanesvar ran foul of current brahmin belief at
Alandi, and had to take refuge about 1290 AD on the south bank of
the Godavari, in the domains of
Ramacandra Yadava, to composed his famous gloss in the common people's
language.
We know as little of the historic action taken or instigated by
Samkara and Ramanuja as we should have known of Tilak's had only his Gita-rahasya
survived. Yet, about the year 800, Samkara was active in some manner
that resulted-according to tradition-in the abolition of many Buddhist
monasterics. That this was achieved by his penetrating logic and sheer
ability in disputation is now, the general Hindu belief. The mass of
writing left in his name, and what is given therein as the Buddhist
doctrine which he refutes, make only one thing clear: that he had not the
remotest idea of Gotama Buddha's original teaching. Buddhism as practised
in the monasteries had in any case degenerated into Lamaism with opulent vihara
foundations which were a serious drain upon the economy of the country.
That Samkara's activity provided a stimulus to their abolition, and
Ramanuja's some handle against the wealthier barons whose worship of Siva
was associated in the popular mind with their oppressive land- rent, seems
a reasonable conclusion on the evidence before us. Otherwise, it would be
difficult to explain why the richer, aristocratic landholders opted for
Siva, the poorer, and relatively plebeian overwhelmingly for Visnu, in the
bitter smarta-vaisnava feuds it is difficult to believe that they
could come to blows because of differing religious philosophy. Samkara
managed to discover a higher and lower knowledge in the Upanisads which
allowed him "to conform to the whole apparatus of Hindu
belief"-whatever that may mean- "on the lower plane, while on the
higher he finds no true reality in anything; his logic, it has been well
said, starts by denying the truth of the proposition, 'A is either B or not
B' ...At death the soul when released is merged in the absolute and does
not continue to be distinct from it". According to Ramanuja, "if
in a sense there is an absolute, whence all is derived, the individual
souls and matter still have a reality of their own, and the end of life is
not merger in the absolute but continued blissful existence. This state is
to be won by bhakti, faith in and devotion to God." It is not
possible to imagine that subtle arguments on tenuous ideas gripped the
masses, that people could be whipped up to a frenzy merely by the concept
of restricted dualism (visnuadvaita) or thoroughgoing dualism (dvaita
).Yet frenzied conflict there was, for centuries. Neither side objected
to rendering faithful service at the same time to beef-eating Muslim
overlords, who knocked brahmins off without compunction or retribution, and
desecrated temples without divine punishment.
The main conclusion is surely the following: Practically anything
can be read into the Gita by a determined person, without denying
the validity of a class system. THE GITA FURNISHED THE ONE SCRIPTURAL
SOURCE WHICH COULD BE USED WITHOUT VIOLENCE TO ACCEPTED BRAHMIN
METHODOLOGY, TO DRAW lNSPIRATION AND JUSTIFICATION FOR SOCIAL ACTIONS IN
SOME WAY DISAGREEABLE TO A BRANCH OF THE RULING CLASS upon whose mercy the
brahmins depended at the moment. That the action was not mere personal
opportunism is obvious in each of the cases cited above. It remains to show
how the document achieved this unique position.
2 REMARKABLE INTERPOLATION
That the song divine is sung for the upper classes by the
brahmins, and only through them for others, is clear. We hear from the
mouth of Krsna himself (G.9.32): "For those who take refuge in
Me, be they even of the sinful breeds such as women, vaisyas, and
sudras." That is, all women and all men of the working and producing
classes are defiled by their very birth, though they may in after-!ife be freed by their faith in
the god who degrades them so casually in this one. Not only that, the god
himself had created such differences (G.4.13) : "The four-caste
(-class) division has been created by Me" ; this is proclaimed in the
list of great achievements.
The doctrines are certainly not timeless (3). Ethics come into being only
as they serve some social need. Food-producing society (as distinct from
conflicting aggregates of food-gathering tribal groups) originated in the
fairly recent and defined historical past, so that the principles upon
which it may work at some given stage could not have expressed from
eternity. The Gita sets out each preceeding doctrine in a masterly
and sympathetic way without naming or dissecting it, and with consummate skill
passes smoothly on to another when Arjuna asks 'why then do you ask me to
do something so repulsive and clearly against this?" Thus, we have a
brilliant (if plagiarist) review- synthesis of many schools of thought
which were in many respects mutually incompatible. The incompatibility is
never brought out; all views are simply facets of the one divine mind. The
best in each system is derived, naturally, as from the high God. There is
none of the polemic so characreristic of disputatious Indian philosophy;
only the Vedic ritual beloved of the Mimamsakas is condemned outright. The
Upanisads are well-if anonymously- represented, though the svetasvalara
upanisad alone contains the germ of bhakti, and none the theory
of perfection through a large succession of rebirths. This function of karma
is characteristically Buddhist. Without Buddhism, G.2.55-72 (recited
daily as prayers at Mahatma Gandhi's asrama) would be impossible. The brahma-nirvana
of G. 2.72 and 5.25 is the Buddhist ideal state of escape from the effect
of karma. We may similarly trace other-unlabelled- schools of
thought such as Samkhya and Mimansa down to early Vedanta (G. 15. 15
supported by the reference to the Brahma-sutra in G. 13.4). This
helps date the work as somewhere between 150-350 AD, nearer the
later than the earlier date. The ideas are older, not original, except
perhaps the novel use of bhakti. The language is high classical
Sanskrit such as could not have been written much before the Guptas, though
the metre still shows the occasional irregularity (G. 8. 10d, 8. 11 b, 15.
3a, &c) in tristubhs, characteristic of the M'bh as a
whole. The Sanskrit of the high Gupta period, shortly after the time of the
Gita, would have been more careful in versification.
It is known in any case that the M'bh and the Puranas
suffered a major revisions in the period given above. The M'bh in
particular was in the hands of Brahmins belonging to the Bhrgu clan, who
inflated it to about its present bulk (though the process of inflation
continued afterwards) before the Gupta age came to flower. The Puranas also
continued to be written or rewritten to assimilate some particular cult of
Brahminism. The last discernible reaction of the main Purana group refers
to the Guptas still as local prince between Fyzabad and Prayag(4). This context fits the Gita
quite well. The earliest dated mention of anything that could possibly
represent the Gita is by Hsiuen Chuang (5), early in the seventh century, who refers to a
Brahmin having forged at his king's order such a text, (supposedly of
antiquity) which was then 'discovered', in order to foment war. The fact
does remain that the M'bh existed in two versions at the time of the
Asvalayana Grhya Sutra, which refers both to the Bharata and
the Mahabharata (6).
The prologue of the present M'bh repeats much the same
information in such a way as to make it evident that the older 24,000-sloka
Bharata was still current at the time the longer version was
promulgated. Every attempt was made to ascribe both to the great
'expander', Vyasay to whom almost every Purrana is also ascribed. A common
factor is the number 18, which had some particular sanctity for the whole
complex, and for the Brahmins connected therewith. There are 18 main gotra
clan-groups of brahmins (7)though
the main rsi sages are only seven in number; many of the 18 (e.g.
the kevala Bhargarvas and kevala Angirasas) are difficult to
fit into a rational theme. Correspondingly there are 18 main Puranas, and
18 parvan sections of the M'bh, though the previous division
was into 100, as we learn from the prologue. The very action of the
Bharatan war was fought over 18 days between 18 legions. The Gita has
also 18 adhyoyas, which is surely not without significance. That the
older Bharata epic had a shorter but similar Gita is
unlikely. One could expect some sort of an exhortation to war, as is
actually contained in G. 2.37: "If slain, you gain heaven; if
victorious, the earth; so up, son of Kunti, and concentrate on
fighting". These lines fit the occasion very well. Such pre-battle
urging was customary in all lands at all times (advocated even by the
supremely practical Arthasastra, 10.3) through invocations and
incantations, songs of bards, proclamations by heralds, and speech of
captain or king. What is highly improbable- except to the brahmin bent upon
getting his niti revisions into a popular lay of war-is this most
intricate three-hour discourse on moral philosophy, after the battle-conch
had blared out in mutual defiance and two vast armies had begun their
inexorable movement towards collision.
To put it bluntly, the utility of the Gita derives from
its peculiar fundamental defect, namely dexterity in seeming to reconcile
the irreconcilable. The high god repeatedly emphasizes the great virtue of
non-killing (ahimsa), yet the entire discourse is an incentive to
war. So G.2. 19 ff. says that it is impossible to kill or be killed.
The soul merely puts off an old body as a man his old clothes, in exchange
for new; it cannot be cut by weapons, nor suffer from fire, water or the
storm. In G. 11, the terrified Arjuna sees all the warriors of both sides
rush into a gigantic Visnu- Krshna's innumerable voracious mouths, to be
swallowed up or crushed. The moral is pointed by the demoniac god himself
(G. 11. 33) : that all the warriors on the field had really been destroyed
by him; Arjuna's killing them would be a purely formal affair whereby he
could win the opulent kingdom. Again, though the yajna sacrifice is
played down or derided, it is admitted in G. 3. 14 to be the generator of
rain, without which food and life would be impossible. This slippery
opportunism characterizes the whole book. Naturally, it is not surprising
to find so many Gita lovers imbued therewith. Once it is admitted
that material reality is gross illusion, the rest follows quite simply; the
world of "doublethink" is the only one that matters.
The Gita was obviously a new composition, not the
expansion of some proportionately shorter religious instruction in the old
version. I next propose to show that the effort did not take hold for some
centuries after the composition.
1.3. NOT SUFFICIENT UNTO THE PURPOSE
The lower classes were necessary as an audience, and the heroic
lays of ancient war drew them to the recitation. This made the epic a most
convenient vehicle for any doctrine which the Brahmins wanted to insert;
even better than rewriting the Puranas, or faking new Puranas for age-old
cults. The Sanskrit language was convenient, if kept simple, because the
Prakrits were breaking apart into far too many regional languages; Sanskrit
was also the language which the upper classes had begun to utilize more and
more, Kusana and Satavahana inscriptions are in the popular lingua
franca used by monk and trader. But from 151 AD, there appears a
new type of chief (oftener than not of foreign origin like Rudradaman) who
brags (8) in ornate
Sanskrit of his achievements, including knowledge of Sanskrit. The
Buddhists had begun to ignore the Teacher's injunction to use the common
people's languages; they too adopted Sanskrit. The high period of classical
Sanskrit literature really begins with their religious passion-plays and
poems, such as the written by Asvaghosa (9). A patrician class favouring Sanskrit as well as
the Sanskrit-knowing priestly class was in existence.
No one could object to the interpolation (10) of a story (akhyana)
or episode. After all, the M'bh purports to be the recitation in the
Naimisa forest to the assembled sages and ascetics by a bard Ugrasravas,
who repeated what Vyasa had sung to Janamejaya as having been reported by
Sanjaya to Dhrtarastra! The brahmins were dissatisfied with the profit
derived from the Gita, not with its authenticity. So, we have the Anu-gita
(11) as a
prominent sequel in the 14th Canto (Asvamedha- parvan). Arjuna
confesses that he has forgotten all the fine things told before the battle,
and prays for another lesson. Krsna replies that it would be impossible
even for him to dredge it out of his memory once again; the great effort
was not to be duplicated. However, an incredibly shoddy second Gita is
offered instead which simply extols brahminism and the brahmin. Clearly,
that was felt necessary at the time by the inflators though no one reads it
now, and it cannot be compared to the first Gita even for a moment.
Secondly, the Gita as it stands could not possibly help
any ksatriya in an imminent struggle, if indeed he could take his mind off
the battle long enough to understand even a fraction thereof. The
ostensible moral is : "Kill your brother, if duty calls, without
passion; as long as you have faith in Me, all sins are forgiven." Now
the history of India always shows not only
brothers but even father and son fighting to the death over the throne,
without the slightest hesitation or need for divine guidance. Indra took
his own father by the foot and smashed him (RV 4.18.12), a feat
which the brahmin Vamadeva applauds Ajatasatru, king of Magadha, imprisoned his father
Bimbisara to usurp the throne and then had the old man killed in prison.
Yet, even the Buddhists (12) and Jains as well as Brahadrayaka Upanishad
(2.1) praise the son (who was the founder of India's first great empire) as a
wise and able king. The Arthasastra (A.1.17-18) devotes a chapter to
precautions against such ambitious heirs-apparent; and shows in the next
how the heir- apparent could circumvent them if he were in a hurry to wear
the crown. Krsna himself at Kuruksetra had simply to point to the Yadava
contingent, his own people, who were fighting in the opposite ranks. The
legend tells us that all the Yadavas ultimately perished fighting among
themselves. Earlier, Krsna had killed his maternal uncle Kamsa. The tale
gains a new and peculiar force if it is remembered that under mother-right,
the new chief must always be the sister's son of the old.
Thirdly, Krsna as he appears in the M'bh is singularly
ill-suited to propound any really moral doctrine. The most venerable
character of the epic, Bhisma, takes up the greatest of M'bh parvans
(Santi) with preaching morality on three important questions:
King-craft (raja-dharma), conduct in distress (apad-dharma), and
emancipation (moksa-dharma). As regent, he had administered the
kingdom to which he had freely surrendered his own right. He had shown
irresistible prowess and incomparable knightly honour throughout a long
life of unquestioned integrity. The sole reproach anyone can make is that
he uses far too many words for a man shot full of arrows, dying like a
hedgehog on a support of its own quills. Still, Bhisma seems eminently
fitted to teach rectitude. But Krsna? At every single crisis of the war,
his advice wins the day by the crookedest of means which could never have
occurred to the others. To kill Bhisma, Sikhandin was used as a living
shield against whom that perfect knight would not raise a weapon, because
of doubtful sex. Drona was polished off while stunned by the deliberate
false report of his son's death. Karna was shot down against all rules of
chivalry when dismounted and unarmed; Duryodhana was bludgeoned to death
after a foul mace blow that shattered his thigh. This is by no means the
complete list of iniquities. When taxed with these transgressions, Krsna
replies bluntly at the end of the Salya-parvan that the man could
not have been killed in any other way, that victory could never have been
won otherwise. The calculated treachery of the Arthasastra saturates
the actions of this divine exponent of the Bhagavad-gita. It is
perhaps in the same spirit that leading modern exponents of the Gita and
of ahimsa like Rajaji have declared openly that non-violence is all
very well as a method of gaining power, but to be scrapped when power has
been captured: "When in the driver's seat, one must use the
whip."(13)
1.4 WHY KRISNA ?
Just as the M'bh could be used as a basis only because
people came to hear the war-story recite, Krsna could have been of
importance only if his cult were rising in popularity, yet sufficiently
unformed for such barefaced remoulding. The cult, however, is clearly
synthetic. The identification with Narayana is a syncretism, taking
originally distinct cults as one. In the same direction is the assimilation
of many sagas to a single Krsna legend, whether or not the original hero
bore the epithet of Krsna. There would, however, be no question of creating
a new cult out of whole cloth; some worship or set of similar worships must
already have been in existence among the common people before any brahmins
could be attracted thereto. The best such recent example is that of
Satyanarayana, the true Narayana, so popular all over the country, but
which has no foundation whatever in scripture, and which is not even
mentioned 200 years ago. Indeed, the origin seems to be in the popular
legends of one Satya Pir, (14)
in Bengal; the Pir himself became
Satyanarayana.
The vedas have a Visnu, but no Narayana. The etymology seems to
be 'who sleeps upon the flowing waters (nara)' and this is taken as the
steady state (fig.
1.1) of Narayana(15). It precisely describes the
Mesopotamian Ea or Enki, who sleeps in his chamber in the midst of the
waters, as Sumerian myth and many a Sumerian seal, (fig. 1.2) tell us. The word nara (plural) for 'the waters' is
not Indo-Aryan. Both the word and the god might conceivably go back to the Indus Valley. The later appearance in
Sanskrit only means that the peaceful assimilation of the people who
transmitted the legend was late. At any rate, the flood-and-creation myth
(so natural in a Monsoon country) connects the first three avataras, (figs.
1.3, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7) Fish, Tortoise and Boar-surely related to
primitive totemic worships. The Fish has its Mesopotamian counterparts
(fig. 1.4). One performance of this
Narayana is shared by Krsna in the Gita: the visva-rupa-darsana showing
that the god contains the whole universe; he individually represents the
best specimen of each species in it. Though familiar to most of us as in Gita
10-11, there is a prototype version without Krsna in M'bh 3.186.39-
112, which shows that an all- pervading Narayana had been invented much
earlier.
The speech-goddess Vag-ambhrni, in a famous but late hymn
of the Rigveda (RV. 10.12.5), declares that she draws Rudra's bow,
and is her Soma and the substance of all that is best. The original god
whose misdeeds are never sin is surely the upanishadic Indra who says to
Pratardana Daivodasi: "Know thou Me alone; this indeed do I deem man's
supreme good-that he should know Me. I slew the three- headed Tvastra,
threw the Arurmagha ascetics to the wolves, and transgressing many a
treaty, I pierced through and through the Prahladiyans in the heavens, the
Paulomas in the upper air, and the Kalakanjas on this earth. Yet such was I
then that I never turned a hair. So, he who understands Me, his world is
not injured by any deed whatever of his: not by his killing his own mother,
by killing his own father, by robbery, killing an embryo, or the commission
of any sin whatever does his complexion fade" (Kaus .Brah. up. 3.2).
The 'breaking many a treaty' is again the Arthasastra king's normal
practice, though that book mentions that in olden days even a treaty
concluded by simple word of mouth was sacred (A. 7.17). Indra
performed all these dismal feats in vedic tradition, but that tradition
nowhere makes him proclaim himself as the supreme object for bhakti;
papa and bhakti are not vedic concepts. No vedic god can bestow
plenary absolution as in G.18.66 : "Having cast off all (other)
beliefs, rites and observances, yield to Me alone; I shall deliver you from
all sins, never fear". The reason Krsna could do this and not Indra
was that the older god was clearly circumscribed by immutable vedic suktas
and tied to the vedic yajna fire- ritual. He was the model of
the barbarous Aryan war-leader who could get drunk with his followers and
lead them to victory in the fight. His luster had been sadly tarnished by
intervening Buddhism, which had flatly denied yajna and brought in a
whole new conception of morality and social justice. The pastoral form of
bronze- age society with which Indra was indissolubly connected had gone
out of productive existence.
Krsna or rather one of the many Krsnas also resented this
antagonism. The legend of his enmity to Indra reflects in the Rigveda (16) the historical struggle of
the dark pre-Aryans against the marauding Aryans. The black skin-colour was
not an insurmountable obstacle, for we find a Krsna Angirasa as a vedic
seer. The Yadus are a vedic tribe too, but no Krsna seems associated with
them though the 'round Yadu' prisoner of war is mentioned. There was a
'Krsna the son of Devaki' to whom Ghora Angirasa imparted some moral
discipline, according to Chandogya Up. 3.17.1-7. The Mahanubhavas
take Samipani as Krsna's guru, and a few include the irascible
Durvasa in the list of his teachers. Krsna the athletic Kamsa- killer could
beat anyone in the arena, whether or not he was the same Krsna who trampled
down Kaliya (fig. 1.15), the many-headed Naga snake-demon
that infested the Yamuna river at Mathura. Naturally the Greeks who
saw his cult in India at the time of Alexander's
invasion identified Krsna with their own Herakles.
One feature of the Krsna myth, which still puzzles Indians, would
have been quite familiar to the Greeks. The incarnate god was killed-unique
in all Indian tradition- by an arrow shot into his heel, as were Achilles
and other Bronze-age heroes. Moreover, the archer Jaras is given in most
accounts as Krsna's half-brother, obviously the tanist of the sacred king
who had to kill the senior twin. Krsna himself consoles the repentant
killer, and absolves him by saying that his own time had come; the sacred
king's appointed term had ended. One might venture the guess that the
original unpardonable sin committed by Indra and perhaps by Krsna as well
was the violation of matriarchal custom, unthinkable in the older society,
but which they managed to survive triumphantly, and in comparison to which
all other sins paled into insignificance. Certainly, the gokula in
which Krsna was brought up would be patriarchal, as a cattle-herders'
commune. But the Vrindavana where he played his pranks was sacred to
a mother- goddess, the goddess of a group (vrnda) symbolized by the
Tulasi (Basil) plant. Krsna had to marry that goddess, and is still married
to her every year, though she does not appear in the normal list of his
wives; originally, this meant a hieros gamos with the priestess who represented
the goddess, and the annual sacrifice of the male consort. Inasmuch as
there is no myth of Krsna's annual sacrifice, but only of his having
substituted for the husband, as he seems to have broken the primitive
usage, as did Herakles and Theseus.
The taming of the Naga has perhaps a deeper significane
than Herakles decapitating the Hydra, a feat still earlier portrayed (fig. 1.16) in the Mesopotamian
glyptic. The Naga was the patron deity, perhaps aboriginal cult
object of the place. The trampling down of Kaliya instead of killing
indicates the obvious survival of Naga worship, and parallels the
action of Mahisasura-mardini. Such cults survive to this day, as for
example that of Mani-naga, which has come down through the centuries near
Orissa. Nilatmata-naga, for whom the brahmins wrote a special purana(17) was the primitive deity of
Kasmir. The Naga Srikantha had to be faced in a duel by Pusyabhuti, king of
Thanesar. Such local guardian nagas are current down to the l0th century
work Navasahasanka- carito. So, our hero had a considerable
following among the Indian people, even in the 4th century BC. By
the later Sunga period he was called Bhagavat, originally the Buddha's
title. A Greek ambassador Heliodor (18)
proclaims himself convert to the cult, on the pillar near Bhila. That Krsna
had risen from the pre-Aryan people is clear from a Paninian reference (Pan
4.3.98, explained away by the commentator Patanjali) to the effect that
neither Krsna nor Arjuna counted as ksatriyas. But his antiquity is
considerable, for he is the one god who uses the sharp wheel, the missile
discus, as his peculiar weapon. This particular weapon is not known to the
Vedas and went out of fashion well before the time of the Buddha. Its
historicity is attested only by cave paintings' (fig. 1.17) in Mirzapur which show
raiding horse-charioteers (clearly enemies of the aboriginal stone-age
artists) one of whom is about to hurl such a wheel. The event and the
painting may fairly be put at about 800 BC (19) by which date the dark god was on the side
of the angels, no longer an aborigine himself.
A historical tribe of Vrisnis is actually known about the 2nd
century AD by a single coin (fig. 1.18) in the British Museum found near Hoshiarpur in the
Punjab. When Krsna's people were
driven out of Mathura by fear of Jarasamdha (M'bh. 2.13.47-49 and
2.13.65), they retreated WESTWARDS to found a new mountain- locked city of
Dvaraka, which is, therefore, more likely to have been near modern Darwaz
in Afghanistan rather than the Kathiawad seaport. When the Buddhist Mahamayyuri
mantra (circa 3rd century AD ) speaks of Visnu as the guardian yaksa
of Dvaraka however (Sylvain Levi, Joumal Asiatique 1915.19-138;
line 13 of Sanskrit text), presumably the latter city was meant; it is
notable that Visnu and not Krsna is named. As for the Deccan Yadavas, the
brahmins who found a genealogy which connect them to the dark god had no
deeper aim in the forgery than to raise the chiefs of a local clan above
the surrounding population.
Finally, there was also the useful messianic aspect as in G.4.7 (20). The many proto- historic
Krsnas and current belief in transmigration made the avatara syncreticism possible. It could also lead the devotee
in his misery to hope for a new avatara
to deliver him from oppression in this world, as he hoped for
salvation in the next.
1.5 WHEN DOES A SYNTHESIS WORK ?
Like the avataras ot Visnu-Narayana, the various Krisnas
gathered many different worships into one without doing violence to any,
without smashing or antagonizing any. Krsna the mischievous and beloved shepherd
lad is not incompatible with Krsna the extraordinarily virile husband of
many women. His 'wives' were originally local mother-goddesses, each in her
own right. The 'husband' eased the transition from mother-right to
patriarchal life, and allowed the original cults to be practised on a
subordinate level. This is even better seen in the marriage of Siva and
Parvati which was supplemented by the Ardha-narisvara hermaphrodite
[half Siva, half Parvati, (fig. 13) just to prevent any
separation]. Mahisasura (Mhasoba), the demon killed by that once
independent goddess, is still occasionally worshipped near her temple (as
at the foot of Parvati hills (21) in
Poona). Sometimes, (as at Vir) he
is found married to a goddess (Jogubai) now equated to Durga while another
goddess (Tukai) similarly identified is shown crushing the buffalo demon on
the adjacent hillock. The wide- spread Naga cult was absorbed by putting
the cobra about Siva's neck, using him as the canopied bed on which
Narayana floats in perpetual sleep upon the waters, and putting him also in
the hand of Ganesa. The bull Nandi was worshipped by stone-age people long
before Siva had been invented to ride on his back. The list can be extended
by reference to our complex iconography, and study of the divine
households. Ganesa's animal head and human body equate him to the
'sorcerers' and diabolical (22) painted
by ice-age men (fig.
1.19) in European
caves.
This is "in the Indian character", and we have remarked
that a similar attitude is reflected in the philosophy of the Gita. No
violence is done to any preceding doctrine except vedic yajna. The
essential is taken from each by a remarkably keen mind capable of deep and
sympathetic study; all are fitted together with consummate skill and
literary ability, and cemented by bhakti without developing their
contradictions. The thing to mark is that the Indian character was not
always so tolerant. There are periods when people came to blows over
doctrine, ritual, and worship. Emperor Harsa Siladitya (circa 600-640 AD)
of Kanauj found no difficulty in worshipping Gauri, Mahesvara-Siva, and
the Sun, while at the same time he gave the fullest devotion to Buddhism (23) His enemy Narendragupta-
Sasanka, raided Magadha from Bengal, cut down the Bodhi tree at Gaya, and
wrecked Buddhist foundations wherever he could. What was the difference?
Why was a synthesis of the two religions, actually practised by others besides
Harsha (as literary references can show) not successful?
Let me put it that the underlying difficulties were economic.
Images locked up too much, useful metal; monasteries and temples after the
Gupta age withdrew far too much from circulation without replacement or
compensation by adding to or stimulating production in any way. Thus, the
most thoroughgoing iconoclast in Indian history was another king Harsa
(1089-1101 AD) who broke up all images(24) in Kasmir, except four that were spared. This
was done systematically under a special minister devotpatana-nayaka, without
adducing the least theological excuse, though one could easily have been
found. The Kasmirian king remained a man of culture, a patron of Sanskrit
literature and the arts; he presumably read the Gita too. But he
needed funds for his desperate fight against the Damara group of local
barons. The particular campaign was won, at the cost of making feudalism
stronger than ever.
The conclusion to be drawn is that a dovetailing of the superstructure
will be possible only when the underlying differences are not too great.
Thus, the Gita was a logical performance for the early Gupta period,
when expanding village settlement brought in new wealth to a powerful
central government. Trade was again on the increase, and many sects could
obtain economic support in plenty. The situation had changed entirely by
the time of Harsa Siladitya, though many generous donations to monasteries
were still made. The village had to be more or less self-contained and self-
supporting. Tax-collection by a highly centralized but non- trading state
was no longer a paying proposition, because commodity production per head
and cash trade were low (25)
this is fully attested by the miserable coinage. The valuable, concentrated
luxury trade of the Kusana- satavahana era had suffered relative decline in
spite of feudal and monastic accumulation of gold, silver, jewels, etc.
Once magnificent cities like Patna, no longer necessary for
production, had dwindled to villages containing ruins which people could
regard only as the work of superhuman beings. There was no longer enough
for all; one or the other group had to be driven to the wall. One such
instance is the combined Hari-Hara cult [with an image half Siva, half
Visnu. (fig. 1.20)] which had its brief heyday
but could not remain in fashion much beyond the 9th century. The followers
of Hari and Hara found their interests too widely separated, and we have
the smarta-vaisnva struggle instead. With Mughal prosperity at its
height, Akbar could dream of a synthetic Din-e-ilahii; Aurangzeb
could only try to augment his falling revenue by increased religious
persecution and the jizya tax on unbelievers.
To sum up, writing the Gita was possible only in a period
when it was not absolutely necessary. Samkara could not do without the
intense polemic of theological controversy. To treat all views tolerantly
and to merge them into one implies that the crisis in the means of
production is not too acute. FUSION AND TOLERANCE BECOME IMPOSSIBLE WHEN
THE CRISIS DEEPENS, WHEN THERE IS NOT ENOUGH OF THE SURPLUS PRODUCT TO GO
AROUND, AND THE SYNTHETIC METHOD DOES NOT LEAD TO INCREASED PRODUCTION.
Marrying the gods to goddesses had worked earlier because the conjoint
society produced much more after differences between matriarchal and
patriarchal forms of property were thus reconciled. The primitive deities
adopted into Siva's or Visnu's household helped enlist food-gathering
aboriginals into a much greater food-producing society. The alternative
would have been extermination or enslavement, each of which entailed
violence with excessive strain upon contemporary production. The vedic
Aryans who tried naked force had ultimately to recombine with the autochthonous
people. The Gita might help reconcile certain factions of the ruling
class. Its inner contradictions could stimulate some exceptional reformer
to make the upper classes admit a new reality by recruiting new members.
But it could not possibly bring about any fundamental change in the means
of production, nor could its fundamental lack of contact with reality and
disdain for logical consistency promote a rational approach to the basic
problems of Indian society.
1 .6. THE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS OF BHAKTI
However, the Gita did contain one innovation which
precisely fitted the needs of a later period: bhakti, personal
devotion. To whoever composed that document, bhakti was the
justification, the one way of deriving all views from a single divine
source. As we have seen from the demand for the quite insipid Anu-Gita sequel,
this did not suffice in its own day. But with the end of the great
centralized personal empires in sight, Harsa's being the last- the new
state had to be feudal from top to bottom. The essence of fully developed
feudalism is the chain of personal loyalty which binds retainer to chief,
tenant to lord and baron to king or emperor. Not loyalty in the abstract
but with a secure foundation in the means and relations of production: land
ownership, military service, tax-collection and the conversion of local
produce into commodities through the magnates. This system was certainly
not possible before the end of the 6th century AD. The key word (26) is samanta which till
532 at last meant 'neighbouring ruler' and by 592 AD h'ad come to
mean feudal baron. The new 'barons were personally responsible to the king,
and part of a tax-gathering mechanism. The Manusmrti king, for
example, had no samantas; he had to administer everything himself,
directly or through agents without independent status. The further
development of feudalism 'from below' meant a class of people at the
village level who had special rights over the land (whether of cultivation,
occupation, or hereditary ownership) and performed special armed service as
well as service in tax-collection. To hold this type of society and its
state together, the best religion is one which emphasizes the role of bhakti,
personal faith, even though the object of devotion may have clearly
visible flaws.
Innumerable medieval rustic 'hero' stones (27) commemorate the death in
battle usually a local cattle-raid-of an individual whose status was above
that of the ordinary villager. In older days, the duty of protecting the
disarmed villages would have been performed by the gulma garrisoning
the locality. The right to bear arms (with the concomitant obligation to
answer a call to arms) was now distributed among a select class of persons
scattered through the villages. Many inscriptions vaunt the Ganga baron's sacrifice of their
own heads in front of some idol, to confer benefit upon their king. More
than one epigraph declares the local warrior's firm intention not to
survive his chief (28).
Marco Polo (29)
reported of the 13th century Pandyas that the seigneurs actually cast
themselves upon the king's funeral pyre, to be consumed with the royal
corpse. This suits the bhakti temperament very well. Though
barbarous, it is not the type of loyalty that a savage tribal chief could
expect or receive from his followers, unless his tribe were in some
abnormal situation.
Though bhakti was the basic need in feudal ideology, its
fruits were not enjoyed equally by all. By the 12th century, feudal
taxation had begun to weigh heavily upon the peasantry, who paid not only
for the luxurious palace but also its counterpart- the equally rich and
even more ornate temple. Brahminism had definitely come to the top, as may
be seen from two monumental collections of the period, namely the Krtyakalpataru
of Bhakta Laksmidhara (minister of Govindacandra Gahadavala of Kanauj,
circa 1150 AD); and a century later, Hemadri's quite similar Caturvargacintamani.
The latter was chancellor of the exchequer (maha-karan- dhipa) under
the last Yadavas of Devagiri (Daulatabad). He is described as the
outstanding computer (ganakagrahi). A few tables for quick
assessment survive in Hemadri's name; the name is also (wrongly) coupled in
Marathi tradition with the general use of bajri as cultivated
food-grain, the cursive Modi alphabet, and the numerous
close-jointed mortarless Yadava temples that had been built centuries
earlier, to develop from little shrines of matchless proportion and balance
into rank, clumsy, richly endowed structures by the 12th century. Yet his magnum
opus, far from being another Arthasastra, or an Ain-i-Akbri, or
an Indian Corpus Juris Civilis, is concerned almost entirely with
brahminical rites and ritual codified from Puranas and other accepted
religious books. The published seven volumes contain perhaps three fifths
of the original. Anyone who performed even a tenth of the ritual rites
prescribed for any given deity, lunar date, transgression, celebration,
worship, festival or occasion would have no time for anything else; as a
document of a superstitious leisure class, none other known today will bear
comparison with it. A section on jurisprudence preserved in Laksmidhara's
compendium shows that common law was practised and decisions for each
caste, tribe and locality based upon their particular custom; but the work
repeats smrti doctrine without mention of the innovations in
practice, or discussion of a single case.
The protest was expressed in Maharashtra by two different groups,
both oriented towards Krsna worship and -remarkably enough- supported by
primitive survivals. The Mahnubhava or Manbhav sect was
founded by Cakradhara in the 12th- century, and went back to the ideals of
tribal, communal life. Black garmets, absolute rejection of the caste
system, organization into clan-like sub-groups, sharing among members and a
greatly simplified marriage ritual (gada-bada-gunda) prove this,
though a few leaders of the later accumulated some property with a
concomitant thirst for Hindu respectability. The other movement
crystallized by Jnanesvar was particularly strong among the seasonal varkari
pilgrims to Pandharpur, who followed a custom which seems to date back
to the monolithic age. Jnanesvar was under brahmin interdict, as begotten
by an apostate monk; his aged parents drowned themselves in the Ganges while
he himself committed ritual suicide at Alandi, after a short and
exceptionally bitter life. The Marathi saints who followed him all wrote
like him in the vernacular, had personally experienced the hardships of the
common people, and from all castes. Namdev, though a tailor, carried the
new doctrine to the far north, with success. I am told that some of his
work was absorbed directly into the Sikh Canon (Granth Saheb), or
provided stimulus and inspiration even at so great a distance to what
became a great religious movement among the common people of the Punjab.
Gore was a potter by caste and craft. The untouchable Cokha Mela was killed
by collapse of Mangalvedhe town wall for the construction of which he had
been provided by corvee, old as he was. The Paithan brahmin Eknath (fig 1.22). to whom we owe the present
text of the Jnanesvari (in 1590 AD) as well as many fine
Marathi poems, went out of his way to break the crudest restrictions of
untouchability. The greatest of them all, the 16th century kunabi peasant
and petty grain-dealer Tukaram survived grim famine, the unremitting
jealousy of contemporary folk-poets, and the contemptuous hatred of
brahmins, ultimately to drown himself in the river. These men represent a
general movement by no mean confined to their province and language. The
generally painful tenor of their lives shows that they were in the
opposition, and did not care to exercise the meretricious art of pleasing
those in power-quite unlike the brahmins, who did not scorn to develop the
cult of these saints whenever it paid, but always pandered to the rich.
The real military strength of the Marathas, as later of the
Sikhs, derived obviously from the simpler, less caste-ridden, and less unequal
life. The later Maratha generals like the Sinde and Gaekwad rose from
relatively obscure families, unlike the earlier and more distinguished
Candrarao More, Bhonsle, and Jadhav, the last of whom might claim kinship
with the Yadava emperors of Devagiri and through them perhaps with Krsna
himself. Malharrao Holkar was of the Dhangar shepherd caste, and would
normally not have been allowed to rise to the status of a general, duke,
and eventually king. It seems to me that some of this goes back, like the bhagva
jhenda flag of Maratha armies, to Varkari custom. In spite of the
brahmin Badave priests, and the rampant brahminism of the Peshwa
days, the Varkari pilgrims minimized caste observances and distinctions on
the journey. However, the reform and its struggle was never consciously
directed against feudalism, so that its very success meant feudal
patronage- and ultimately feudal decay by diversion of a democratic
movement into the dismal channels of conquest and rapine.
The conglomerate Gita philosophy might provide a loophole
for innovation, but never the analytical tools necessary to make a way out
of the social impasse. Jnanesvar's life and tragic career illustrate this
in full measure. He does not give a literal translation of the divine message,
but its meaning and essence in his own terms, and in words that any Maratha
peasant could understand. Jnanesvar's longest comment on the original comes
in the 13th adhyaya of the Gita, the chapter on 'the field
and field-knower', particularly on G. 13. 7 (where he himself apologizes in
J. 13. 314-338 for having been carried away far from the original)
and on G. 13. 11. In the former, (J. 13.218-224), he flays the
rainrnaking yajanika fire-sacrificers; yet in I. 3. 134-5,
these very sacrifices were taken as normal and necessary by him as by his
divine exemplar; and once again (G. 18.5; J.18. 149-152) both warn
us that the yajna must not be abandoned any more than charity ( dana
) or ascetic practices (tapas). The suffocating contradictions
of mixed superstition are neatly brought out in I. 13. 812-822:
"The peasant farmer sets up cult after cult, according to convenience.
He follows the preacher who seems most impressive at the moment, learns his
mystic formula. Harsh to the living, he relies heavily on stones and
images; but even then never lives true to anyone of then. He will have My
(=Krsna 's) image made established in a corner of the house, and then go on
pilgrimage to some god or other. He will pray to Me daily, but also worship
the family's tutelary deity at need, and other gods as well, each at the
particular auspicious moment. He founds My cult, that makes vows to others;
on anniversary days, he is devoted to the ancestral Manes. The worship he
gives Us on the eleventh (lunar date) is no more than that he renders to
the sacred cobras on the fifth. He is devotee solely of Ganesa on the
(annual) fourth; on the fourteenth, says he, 'Mother Durga, I am yours
alone' ... At the Nine Nights (of the Mother-goddesses) he will recite the
set praise of Candi, serve meals outdoors on the Sunday, and rush off on
Monday with a bel fruit offering to Siva's phallic symbol. Thus he
prays unemittingly, never still for a moment; like a prostitute at the town
gate". In Jnanesvar's society, however, such eclectic worship was the
universal practice at all levels, to the very highest people for whom
Laksmidhara and Hemadri indited their monstrous compendia. To that extent,
though indirectly, the commentator voices a protest against the growth of
an oppressive upper class. The Gita doctrine is given a remarkably
attractive turn by Jnanesvar's quite original interpretation (J. 9,
460-470): "Ksatriya, vaisya, woman, sudra and untouchable retain their
separate existence only so long as they have not attained Me... just as rivers
have their individual names, whether coming from east or west, only till
they merge into the ocean. Whatever be the reason for which one's mind
enters into Me, he then becomes Me, even as the iron that strikes to break
the philosopher's stone turns into gold at the contact. So, by carnal love
like the milk- maids, Kamsa in fear, Sisupala by undying hatred, Vasudeva
and the Yadavas by kinship, or Narada, Dhruva, Aknira, Suka and Sanatkumara
through devotion-they all attained Me. I am the final resting place,
whether they come to Me by the right or the wrong path, bhakti, lust
or the purest love, or in enmity". Neither the callous G. 9.32 on
which this charming comment is made, nor the fundamentally brutal Krsna
saga manifest such a calm elevation above jealous, exclusive bhakti. Yet,
on the very next stanza, the scholiast extols brahmins as veritable gods on
earth! His rejection by contemporary brahmins, which must surely have been
a main reason for the decision to render the Gita into Marathi,
never prevented him from striving after the brahmin vedic lore officially
denied to all but initiates. That is, he embodied the inner contradictions
which he discerned in contemporary society but failed to discover in the
Gita. Therefore, he could launch nomovement towards their solution.
Though an adept in yoga as a path towards physical immortality and
mystical perfection (cf. J. on G. 6. 13-15), there was nothing left
for him except suicide. That the gods remained silent at the unexpected
Muslim blow which devastated their many richly endowed temples and no
incarnation of Krsna turned up to save the Yadava kingdom, might
have been another cause for despair.
1.7. THE GITA TODAY
The main social problem was violently placed upon a new footing
by Alauddin Khilji and the Muslim conquest which imposed payment of heavy
tribute. This intensified the need for more effective tax collection; that
in turn encouraged a new powerful system of efficient feudalism. Some
optimists have maintained that the poorer classes benefited because
Alauddin squeezed only the rich, who were rendered powerless. This
disingenuous view carefully neglects to mention that even in the Doabs
(which were directly administered) none of the former burdens of the
peasantry were lifted. Their dues were collected by a different agency,
though it remains true that the Hindu upper classes were prevented for a
while from imposing fresh exactions. The provinces had not even this
consolation, for the throne of Delhi exacted harsh tribute from conquered
areas, without troubling itself about how provincial magnates gathered it-
and how much more besides. Local military power was reduced only to a stage
where it constituted little danger to the imperial forces, but the
mechanism of violence more than sufficed for its main purpose, revenue
collection. Whether the tribute was actually paid or not, and even over
regions not subject to tribute, the imposts and exactions grew steadily.
The class that collected the surplus retained an increasing portion, so
that the needs of the state could be satisfied only in the earlier period,
when feudalism stimulated trade and fresh agrarian production. Then the
crisis was aggravated, to be resolved by another foreign conquest that
introduced a totally different form of production, the
bourgeois-capitalist. The modern independence movement did not challenge
the productive form; it only asked that the newly developed Indian
bourgeoisie be in power.
Modern life is founded upon science and freedom. That is, modern
production rests in the final analysis upon accurate cognition of material
reality (science), and recognition of necessity (freedom). A myth may grip
us by its imagery, and may indeed have portrayed some natural phenomenon or
process at a time when mankind had not learned to probe nature's secrets or
to discover the endless properties of matter. Religion clothes some myth in
dogma. "Science needs religion" is a poor way of saying that the
scientists and those who utilize his discoveries must not dispense with
social ethics. There is no need to dig into the Gita or the Bible
for an ethical system sandwiched with pure superstition. Such books can
still be enjoyed for their aesthetic value. Those who claim more usually
try to shackle the minds of other people, and to impede man's progress,
under the most specious claims.
Individual human perfection on the spiritual plane becomes much
easier when every individual's material needs are firmly satisfied on a
scale agreed upon as reasonable (30)
by the society of his day. That is, the main root of evil is
social. The fundamental causes of social evil are no longer concealed from
human sight. Their cure lies not lie in theology but in socialism; the
application of modern science, based upon logical deduction from planned
experiment, to the structure of society itself. Science is at the basis of
modern production; and no other tools of production are in sight for the
satisfaction of man's needs. Moreover, the material needs could, certainly
be satisfied for all, if the relations of production did not hinder it.
NOTES TO CHAPTER I
The following abbreviations have been used: G= the Bhagavad
Gita; J = the Jnanesvari; Mbh = the Mahabharata; Up =
Upanisad; RV = the Rg Veda; JBBRAS = Journal of the Asiatic
Society, Bombay (formerly Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society);
ABORI = Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona;
A = the Arthasastra of Kautalya; JRAS = Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, London. For the historical background, my own Introduction
to the Study of Indian History has been used without detailed
reference.
1. M'bh. 6.23-40 of the Poona edition, begun under the
editorship of the late V. S. Sukthankar, with the Adi, Sabha, Aranyaka,
Udyoga and Virata parvans completed under his direction. Succeeding
volumes have been less satisfactory, and the edition is not yet complete.
For the Gita in particular, the readings generally assumed to be
Samkara's have been retained against the norm accepted for the rest of the
edition. Among the many useful translations of the Gita are that of
F. Edgerton (Harvard Oriental Series), K. T. Telang (Sacred Books of the
East), and S. Radhakrishnan (London 1948).
2. R. G. Bhandarkar's Vaisnavism, Saivism and Minor Religious
Systems (originally published in 19l3 in the Grundriss d.
Indo-Arischen Philologie u. Altertumskunde ; re-issued, Poona 1929, in
vol. IV of his collected works) gives a good summary of the influence of
the doctrine in the classical and medieval period, but without reference to
the historical context, which was indeed not known at the time. Its
influence upon Bhandarkar himself led to a petty reformist movement, the
Prarthana Samaj (an offshoot of the Brahmo Samaj) in whim RGB was the
dominant figure; and support of widow remarriage, then unheard of for
brahmins, though practised by some 85% at least of the population. That he
spoke for a very narrow class in the attempt to speak for the whole of
India never struck him, nor for that matter other contemporary 'reformers'.
Still, the silent change of emphasis from caste to class was a necessary
advance.
3. In particular, the translation of dhamma as religion,
or even a universal Law for all society was "new concept with
Buddhism, not accepted even after the time of the G. For example Manusmriti
8.41 reads "The (king) must inquire into the laws (dharma) of
each caste (jati), district (janapad), guild (sreni),
and household (kula), and only then give his own legal decision (svodharma)".
A great deal of the confusion over the Gita derives from
ignorance of reality, of the actual practices of large social groups; and
from taking brahmin documents as representative of all Indian society.
4. The standard reference work is F. E. Pargiter's The purana
text of the dynasties of the Kali age (Oxford, 1913). Some of
the theories have been tested e.g. A. B. Keith's review in the JRAS, but
the work has survived and gained and deserved reputation for its synoptic
edition of the historical kernel in the major puranas.
5. Translated in S. Beal: Buddhist Records of the Western
World (London 1884, vol. I, pp. 184.186). The equivalent of G. 237
does occur on p.185, and the association with a great battle at Dhrmasetra,
where bones still whitened the earth, is explicit, in an otherwise
garbled account.
6. V. S. Sukthakar: The Nala episode and the Ramayana in Festchrift
F.W. Thomas, pp. 294- 303, especially p. 302, where he concludes that
the two versions bracket the extant Ramayana. The paper is reprinted
in his Memorial edition (Poona 1944), pp. 400-415. For the mechanism of
inflation see his Epic Studies, VI; and my notes on the Parvasamgraha,
in the JAOS. 69.110-117; for the Bhismaparvan and the 745
stanzas of the Gita, ibid 71.21-25.
7. J. Brough : The early Brahmanical system of gotra and
pravara (Cambridge, 1953), p. 27, notes that the kevala Angirasas
are completely omitted by Hiranyakesi- Satyasadhna, but takes this to be a
casual lacuna. So great an omission is highly improbable. My review in JAOS
73.202-208 was mistaken for a polemic, when the point being made was
that theoretical works on gotra need to be checked by independent
observation. For example, the segrava (=saigrava) gotra found in
Brahmi; inscriptions at Mathura is not known to the books. Even more
striking are the innumerable local brahmin groups whose confounding to
theory has never been tested. City people in Maharashtra take brahmins to
be primarily of the Saraswat, Citpavan, Desastha and Karhada groups. The
1941 Census caste tables for Bombay province, as published show that
such categories are together outnumbered by the "Other Brahmans"
and that local brahmin groups are the rule, though the books and theory are
in the hands of the major groups named. The Bhrgus are specially connected
with the M'bh inflation, as was shown by V. S. Sukthankar in his
magnificent Epic Studies VI (ABORI 18.1-76; Mem. Ed. 1.278-337).
It is important to note that the Bhargava inflation was independent of
though not hostile to the Narayana inflation, which continued after the
first had tapered off. So much so, that the famous benedictory stanza Narayanam
namaskrtya of the popular editions drops out of the critical text, but
most of the property Bhargava inflations (e.g. needless emphasis upon
Parasurama) all remain. In G. 10.25, the Lord reveals himself as Bhrgu
among the great sages (maharsinam Bhrgur aham), though that sage
occupies no position in vedic tradition, and a trifling one even later.
8. Epigraphia Indica 8.36 ff.
9. Asvaghosa's Buddhacarita and Saundarananda still
exist, not to speak of subhasita verses scattered through
anthologies in his name. The fragments of a play Sariputra-prakarana were
arranged in order by H. Luders, from Central Asian (Turfan) finds. This or
another play of the same name was acted by hired actors in Fa Hsien's time
in the Gupta heartland, as were also similar plays on the conversion of
Moggallana and Kassapa; note that all three disciples and Asvaghosa himself
were brahmins.
10. The M'bh diaskeuasts proclaim their desire to include
everything. In M'bh 1.1-2, the work is successively an itihasa, a
purana, an upanisad, a veda, and outweighs all four vedas
together. It is the storehouse for poets. M'bh, 1.56.33 boasts: yad
ihasti tad anyatra, yan nehasti na tat kva-cit: whatever is here might
be elsewhere, but what was not here could hardly ever be found!
11. Translated by K. T. Telang, see Note 1. There is an Uttaragita,
quite modern apocryphal work.
12. This is the second sutta of the Digha-nikaya, and
has served as the model, in many ways, for the later Milindpanho, questions
of king Menander.
13. This was clearly stated by Mr. C. Rajagopalachari in a press
interview.
14. The only published source I have been able to locate for the
original cult is the Satya Pirer Katha in Bengali by Ramesvara
Bhattacaryya (ed. by Sri-Nagendranath Gupta, Calcutta University
1930) .
15. This paragraph and the next are treated in greater detail in
a paper of mine on the avatara syncretism and possible sources of
the Bhagavad- gita, ]BBRAS. vol. 24-25 -1948-9), pp. 121-134.
16. RV. 8.96.13-14, but sometimes interpreted mystically
as part of the Soma legend. The traditional explanation is that this Krsna
was an Asura "i.e. non-Aryan, and the fighting against Indra on the
banks of the Amsumati river was real, not Symbolic of something else.
17. Ed. K. de Vreese, Leiden
1936. This
particular naga cult had been virtually killed by the Buddhist monks
(Rajatarangini 1.177-8), while the brahmins had also been reduced to
helplessness at the time of the Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna. They made a
come-back by writing the Nilamatapurana (Raj. 1. 182-6) , Kalhana
informs us in passing.
18. ABORI 1.59-66; ]RAS 1909.1055-6, 1087-92;
1910.813-5, 815-7.
19. See
JRAS 1960; 17-31, 135-144, or chapter IV of this book; for the cave painting
(originally discovered by Carlleyle) Mrs. B. Allchin in Man, 58.1958,
article 207 + plate M (pp. 153-5).
20. The assurance is unmistakable: " Whenever true belief (dharmra)
pales and un- righteousness flourishes, then do I throw out another
offshoot of myself". The next stanza proclaims that the god comes into
being from age to age, to protect the good people, destroy the wicked and
to establish dharma.. It need not be further emphasized that the
superfluous incarnation in M'bh times wasted a perfectly good avatara,
badly needed elsewhere.
21. The cult is coeval with the foundation of Parvati village,
hence older than the Peshwa temple to the goddess who killed that demon.
Cf. Bombay Gazetteer vol. 1.8, pt. 3 (Poona District), p. 388.
22. Art In The Ice Age by J. Maringer and H. G. Bandi
after Hugo Obermaier (London 1953); especially figures 30, 31, 70 (with
mask, and arms imitating mammoth tusks), 142, 143 and perhaps 166.
23. This shows in Harsa's inscriptions (e.g. Epigraphia Indica
7.155-60); benedictory verses at the beginning of his Buddhist drama Nagananda,
addressed to Gauri; Bana's description in the Harsacarita and
Hsiuen Chuang's account (Beal 1.223; the stupa, vihara, fine
Mahesvara temple and the Sun-temple were all close together near Kanauj,
and all constantly thronged with worshippers) .
24. For the iconoclasm of Harsha of Kasmir, Rajataratigi 7.1080-1098.
He had predecessors of similar bent, though less systematic: Jayapida in
the 8th century (Raj. 631-3 ; 638.9) and Samkaravarman (5.168-70) in
883-902 AD.
25. The Gupta gold coinage is impressive, but hardly useful for
normal transactions. Their silver coinage is notoriously inferior to, say,
pre-Mauryan punch-marked coins, and rather rare in hoards; of Harsa, only
one coinage is known, and even that rather doubtful in silver. The Chinese
travellers Fa Hsien and Hsiuen Chuang are emphatic in the assertion that
most of the transactions were barter, and that cowry shells were also used,
but very little currency. The accumulation by temples, monasteries and
barons did nothing for the circu1ation of wealth or of commodities.
26. This is discussed in a paper of mine to appear in the Journal
for the Economic and Social History of the Orient (Leiden), on feudal
trade charters. Yasodharman of Malwa uses samanta as neighbouring,
ruler, whereas Visnusena (a Maitraka king) issued a charter in 592 AD where
samanta can only have the feudal meaning.
27. The hero-stones carved in bas- relief are to be found in
almost any village not recently settled, throughout Maharashtra and the
south. A good collection is in the National Defence Academy's Museum at
Kharakwasla, near Poona. The death in fending off cattle raiders seem to be
symbolized in many cases by a pair of ox-heads in the lowest panels. The
story progresses upwards, to the funeral, perhaps with a sati, and
going to heaven. The top of the relief slab is generally carved in the
semblance of a funeral drum familiar since Buddhist days. For inscriptions,
even a single volume (Epigraphia Carnatica X, for example): Kolar
79, feudal grant for family of baron killed in battle (about 800 AD); Kolar
226 (circa 950 AD), grant of a field, on account of the death of a
warrior fighting against cattle raiders; Kolar 232 (150 AD), Ko!ar 233 (815
AD), Mulbagal 92, 700 AD : Mulbagal 93, 970 AD etc., with the hero-relief
in every case.
28. Less well known than Ganga inscriptions are the minor ones
showing how widely the custom was spread: e.g. from the Ep.
Carnatica, Goribindnur 73 (circa 900 AD), the village watchman
sacrifices his own head; Cintamani 31 1050 AD), when the Odeya of the
village went to heaven his servant had his own head cut off -and a field
was dedicated to his memory; oaths of not surviving the lord are taken in
Kolar 129 (circa 1220 AD), Mulbagal 77 (1250 AD), Mulbagal 78 etc.
Occasionally, a memorial was erected to a particularly able hound, as in
Mulbagal 85 (975 AD), and Mulbagal 162, though the dog's prowess rather
than bhakti is praised.
29. Penguin Classics L 57, Travels of Marco Polo (trans.
R. E. Latham), pp. 236-8, for the cremation, and ritual suicide in front of
some idol, by royal consent.
30. By 'society' is meant not only the rulers but the ruled. If
the sudra should agree that he ought to starve for imaginary sins committed
in some supposed previous birth, either his group will die out, or at best
be unable as well as unwilling to fight against invaders. Indian feudal
history, however, is full of raids and counter-raids, not only by Muslims.
It follows that the expropriated class will not show by its actions that
they regard the expropriation as reasonable on religious grounds,
particularly when they see the very same religion unable to defend its
proponents against armed heretics. My point is simply that the fulfillment
of certain material needs is as essential to health of the mind as it is to
that of the body. It seems to me that the Gita philosophy, like so
much else in India's spiritual heritage, is based in the final analysis
upon the inability to satisfy more than the barest material needs of a
large number.
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