Horse Soldiers and Corn Civilization

I've wondered whether this journey toward Hinduism would be as rewarding as my interest in Tibetan Buddhism¸which seduced me with the wrathful deities, the amazing religious and artistic tradition of indigenous Bon demons incorporated into Tibetan Buddhism as guardian deities. Those people have thought a lot about anger. The wrathful deities are unfailingly beautiful. Buddhism is a creedal faith, and so learning the symbolic structures is a form of devotion. Like Judaism, Hinduism is a religion into which you are born. Correct belief counts less than demonstrating ritual devotion. An unforgiveable simplification of both, but would I be as comfortable, as aesthetically taken, as intellectually impressed? Orientalist I thereby reveal myself to be, I knew the limits of my imagination were at work here, not any useful anticipation or judgment.

Which speaks to why I am going even beyond the academic goals I have. My first trip to Asia was in 2004. A colleague, Oscar Gandy, brought back pictures of temples in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Gobsmacked, as they say, I thought that any place that had those golden beautiful, ethereal spires, like nothing in the West, that was a place I had to go. That was it. And when I realized how much it was going to cost to go to that part of the world, I decided I needed to go to other places as well, Hanoi, now Ho Chi Minh City, and Cambodia. I went and was enthralled, though my experience of Cambodia was not so easily labeled. The next two summers I went to China, teaching, and then Tibet the summer before the March, 2008 riots. India was always back there. An ancient, astounding culture, sedimented in varieties and layers with a democracy on top. But I knew this was not a place to sail in and out of on atourist visa. So I applied for a Fulbright,and, amazingly, I am going in September.

And so I've been reading Diana Eck on Banaras and darsan (the beholding of the deity) and John Keay on history. Now in the middle of what may be the best of all, Wendy Doniger’s new book The Hindus. The dust jacket features a mature woman smiling mischievously from under a wide brimmed hat. A woman with a sense of humor and an optimism about the world. And that’s how she writes. What a perfect introduction. Aimed at the non-specialist, that’s me, but taking me and the culture seriously enough to explain things about its history in a way that makes me excited about what I'm doing.

I'll telescope some of the things she’s saying here. First and most important, no definition of Hinduism encompasses it definitively. No canon, no central institution of enforcement. Not even a settled creed. A relief, that. Doesn’t absolve me of learning everything I can, but relieves me of responsibility for authoritative statements, the lack of which would show how pitiful is my grasp of this huge civilization. It’s my own pace and piece of it I need to pay attention to, an alluvial process. My friend Barbara says of course I’m romanticizing it now, of course, because this is about understanding how a western academic with the usual set of romantic veils about the spiritual nature of India comes to term with the reality, just as Indians have to come to terms with their romanticization of American materialism.

So with Wendy Doniger’s help, I am laughing with delight at the things in the (ancient)history of India that are less foreign to me than I might imagine. A horse-crazy ancient culture (in the northwest and migrating gradually east across the north of India) of cattle rustlers. Growing up at the border of Louisiana and Texas, steeped in westerns, this is not so unfamiliar. Horse soldiers and corn civilizations, the great dynamic of civilized history. The corn civilization creates settled wealth and the horse soldiers redistribute it. Only in the south Asian subcontinent the corn civilizations grew barley and later rice. (It will be interesting to see what inroads corn, the American grain, has made into India, starting with Coca-Cola) And then there’s the horse sacrifice, an amazing thought. One might think Americans wouldn’t sacrifice horses, but they keep them as pets and feed them to pets. Most profane. I’m reminded of the print of Englishmen riding to hounds that hangs in the office of my brother in law in Texas, who loves fast, expensive horses under the hood, and collects guns, and gives my sister a big party at the race track on her birthday. A historically continuous symbolic diffusion of horse lore, dependence and familiarity tethers his imagination to a vision of hunting that admires the class system of English aristocracy, and is not unrelated to the imaginary of the Vedic kshatriya (members of the warrior caste). The same honor culture with its warrior's view of personal freedom and individualism. When I think of horse sacrifice, though, my only contemporary reference is the Godfather, where that gory horror of a beheaded favorite race horse ends up in the bed of the Las Vegas fellow who treats the godfather’s messenger without honor and refuses to make a deal. All this contrasts dramatically with my imagination of widows at Banaras, which shows how much I have to learn about both horses and widows. And that’s a good place to stop today.

Not quite yet. I think of this blog as a place to record general touchstones and reference points, analogies that help me keep track of things. Which I’m learning from Doniger, who deploys contemporary figures of speech and analogies so skillfully. No dry, dusty old Sanskritist, she.

Prakit languages are to Sanskrit like romance languages to Latin, the artificial or perfected language, p. 167. She explains that the preservation of the Buddhist canon in Pali as a broadcasting maneuver, “stretching the Sanskrit envelope” like Vatican II ejecting Latin from the Mass to make the liturgy more comprehensible across the landscape of worshipers. And her notion that the Upanishads are cliffs notes on the Brahmanas—Wendy Doniger, no insult to her, only to my status as a non-specialist—is my cliffs notes on Hindu history and won’t be the only one. Like other religious reform movements, Islam, Protestantism, Christianity, they do not replace but supplement an earlier faith. Vedic Hinduism, sacrificial, worldly, exists alongside vedantic Hinduism, philosophical, renunciant. p. 168. But no official schism, like Christianity. If there had been no official schism in Christianity, what then? Confusion for the faithful, that’s what. Anyway, about Wendy Doniger. 700 pages of text before the bibliography, and I’m underlining everything.