Death, Beauty, Struggle. Margaret Trawick
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also move over space from urban to rural to forest edge to placelessness, and back to urban again. Sarasvati/Māriamman lives in an accessible urban home and in a great temple. Siṅgammā comes from a nomadic tribe, and she herself is a wandering ghost, whose place of burial is inaccessible, whose name and story are obscure. It took this writer decades to get from the first to the last. There is an advantage to obscurity, to singing words with too many meanings, to being where one cannot be found. The disadvantages are both clear and abundant.
This book was made initially of memories—memories of personal experiences, of things read, of things said, of images created in my mind of realities that I never experienced. Reading gives me information, including memories, that I can come back to, or discover for the first time. Putting what I want to say into writing allows me to re-create all this and give it a kind of coherence. For people who cannot read or write, life is different.
Events of the Past That Have Contributed to the Formation of Present Conditions
The history of people now called “untouchable” is an intrinsic part of the history and prehistory of the South Asian subcontinent.3 In present times, the presumed original people of India are called Adivasis and are considered by caste Hindus to be untouchable. The actual first human beings to settle in the subcontinent arrived fifty thousand years or more ago, with the first coastal migrations out of Africa (Pope and Terrell 2008; Wells 2002). Some may have followed the ocean coasts entirely. Some may have traveled up rivers like the Indus. But those who kept on, generation after generation, through centuries, went as far as they could go until they reached Australia, beyond which further travel eastward was not possible. As they traveled they left settlements along the way, including settlements in Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands, and the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Modes of living in the subcontinent moved from fishing and forest dwelling to small-scale farming and herding; to countless different ways of living, of speaking, of organizing families and communities; to walled towns, to warfare, temples and palaces, kingdoms and empires. People came and went throughout the subcontinent, and to and from distant lands. As time went on, in addition to solo travelers and small groups of travelers, there came large invasions, mass migrations, conquests, bigger wars. And as all of this was happening, all the other modes of living continued, albeit becoming increasingly marginalized.4
The Indus Valley Civilization was the first civilization in South Asia and the largest of the three great civilizations in the world at that time. It had no boundaries. People in that civilization practiced agriculture and horticulture, irrigation, trade with distant countries, metallurgy, and remarkable art. The cities had well-laid-out streets and well-engineered water management and sewage systems. There was writing but it has not yet been deciphered. The language spoken may have been Proto-Dravidian or Austroasiatic. No clear sign of royalty or religion has been found by archaeologists of the last century and a half, although some of the artwork could be interpreted as religious. Archaeological research remains ongoing. The civilization continued as such until around 1500 BCE. Possible causes for its decline and end are many, including immigration of new people, drought, and deforestation (Bryant 2001, 159–60; Lawler 2008, 1282–83; Knipe 1991).
Subsequently Vedic cultures came into their own. There were few or no horses in South Asia until around 1500 BCE, when horsemen came from Central Asia across the Himalayas, bringing not only horses (Doniger 2009, chapters 4–5) but their language and culture with them, including long poems that they had memorized. It is difficult to know when their technique of memorization began, as they had no writing system before they entered the subcontinent. The earliest written Sanskrit texts were called the Vedas (“what is known”). They were transmitted orally through generations of ritual specialists. Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, an Indo-European language related to Latin and Greek, spread throughout the whole subcontinent, but mainly through northern India. The oldest and best known of the Vedas was the Rig Veda. It is said to have been composed in northwest India somewhere between 1700 and 1100 BCE. That would have made it nearly contemporaneous with the Indus Valley Civilization and geographically close to it.5
The Rig Veda contains some beautiful, evocative poems, beginning with one that says:
There was neither existence nor non-existence then; there was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond. What stirred? Where? In whose protection? Was there water, bottomlessly deep? There was neither death nor immortality then. There was no distinguishing sign of night nor of day. That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse. Other than that, there nothing beyond. Darkness was hidden by darkness, in the beginning. With no distinguishing sign, all this was water. The life force that was covered with emptiness, that one arose through the power of heat.…Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen? Whence this creation has arisen—perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. (Doniger 1981, 25)
Doniger (2009, chapter 4) argues that a merger between Vedic cultures and Indus Valley cultures resulted in the Hindu cultures and religions that came after these two cultures met. But—again according to Doniger (2009, chapter 5)—whereas the Indus Valley cultures appear to have been benign (Doniger 2009, chapter 3), Vedic cultures were violent from the beginning. Distinguishing the beauty from the horror of the Vedic texts is not an easy job. An elderly Brahman who lived in southern Tamil Nadu told me that there were parts of the Vedas so cruel he had to wash himself after reading them. But the ideological construct of purity and pollution far predates my friend. Certain acts are polluting. Certain acts are cleansing. But no amount of fire or water can drive away certain memories. How could it have felt to sacrifice something as full of life, fine, and beautiful as a horse? The Purusha Sukta hymn in the Rig Veda describes the origin of humankind from the sacrifice of the Cosmic Self (Purusha). That self was divided into pieces, which became different kinds of human being. To whom could such a level of abstraction, with such a current of violence running beneath it, be satisfying?
A Vedic religion developed based on the Rig Veda. At first only wandering ascetics taught these ideas. But as time went on, Brahmanism grew as a religion. Brahmanism is a form of Hinduism, from which religion the idea of varnas arose. This idea was codified in a book called in Sanskrit Manavadharmashastra, or in English, the Laws of Manu. It was said to have been written about 200 BCE. The term varna meant “color” for adherents to Brahmanism and also meant a category of human being. There were four varnas: Brahmans, whose work was to be priests and teachers and whose color was white; Kshatriyas, whose profession was to be kings and warriors and whose whose color was red; Vaishyas, whose profession was to be merchants and traders and whose color was yellow; and Shudras, whose job was to be servants and workers and whose color was black. The top three groups were “twice-born” or dvija. The fourth group was not. Below the Shudras were people who were of mixed birth. The twice-born were inherently privileged. Brahmans were the most privileged of all. They were considered to be gods on earth. Their word was not to be gainsaid. Apologists for the varna system say that it has nothing to do with skin color. Others say that Brahmans were people who came from the north, and that is the reason they are white. The current love of white skin in India is said to be an aesthetic preference only. But the social damage done to dark-skinned people in India, most of all dark-skinned women, is enormous.
Before the varna system was established, there were kingdoms as well as many endogamous groups of people throughout India, and probably also exogamous ones. These groups were not necessarily ranked against each other. One may trace concepts of ranked castes and untouchability back to the ideological development in the subcontinent that started with the Vedas. This ideology moved on and took hold and still is powerful in India. The subjugation of women and of working classes was and remains part of this ideology. According to the Laws of Manu, women are carnal creatures and should never be trusted, while molten lead should be poured in the ears of a low-caste person who hears the Vedas.
Any hierarchical social system can be maintained only by violence. Vedic society was hierarchical and violent from the beginning. The situation of people categorized by social rank, prescribed types of work, color, and sex in India extends to the first implementation of Vedic ideology. The text by Manu is still considered sacred by many Hindus. Not all Hindus follow it, though. Some