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).
