SOME PROBLEMS OF INDIAN RESEARCH
One of the first tasks before the Indian people is the rewriting of their own history. And this, in accordance with the tacit rule of modern learning, will have to be carried out, not by one, but by a combination of individuals; in other words, by an Indian learned society. It is a strange but incontrovertible truth, that none of us knows himself unless he also know whence he arose. To recognise the geographical unity and extent of the great whole we call India is not enough; it is imperative also to understand how it came to be.
Fortunately we are now in possession of a single precious volume—The Early History of India, by Vincent Smith—of which it may roughly be said that it embodies the main results of the work concerning India done during the last century by the Royal Asiatic Society. We must be grateful for so handy a compendium summarising for and opening to the Indian worker the results achieved by the European organisation of research, as nothing else could have done, save that personal intercourse with great scholars which is at present beyond his reach. Vincent Smith's work may seem to some of us, considering its scope and subject, to be curiously unspiritual. Yet is it the veritable handing on to a new generation of scholars of the torch of the spirit.
Nothing surely in all the story here told of early India is more inspiring than that of the Guptas of Magadha and the empire which they, from their ancient seat of Pataliputra, established over the whole of India, The central fact about this great Gupta Empire, as it will seem to Indian readers, is the identification of Vikramaditya, who is now seen to have been "of Ujjain" merely in the familiar modern sense of the title added to the name of the conqueror. Vikramaditya of Ujjain, then, was no other than Chandragupta II of Pataliputra, who reigned from A.D. 375 to A.D. 413.
If this was so, we might take the year A.D. 400 as a sort of water-parting in the history of the development of modern India. The desire becomes irresistible to know how far the Puranic Age was then developed and established; to what extent and under what form Buddhism was still remembered; what was the political outlook of a Hindu of the period; and, among the most important of the questions to be answered, what were the great cities that made up the Indian idea of India, and what the associations of each? The answer to the last of these queries, if discoverable at all, would be of vastly greater significance than all the facts as to sovereigns and kingdoms about which the modern system of learning makes us so unduly curious.
It is already a commonplace among historians that Hinduism, together with Sanskrit learning and literature, underwent under the Guptas what is regarded as a great revival. According to Vincent Smith, most of the Puranas were during this period re-edited and brought into their present shape. Statements of this kind are at present somewhat vague, but accepting what has already been done as our basis, it will, I believe, prove possible to introduce a definiteness and precision into the history of the evolution of Hindu culture which has not hitherto been dreamed of as practicable. We shall soon be able to follow step by step, dating our progress as we go, the introduction of one idea after another into the Hindu system, building up again the world which surrounded the makers of the Puranic age.
In Vincent Smith's pages we can see the great tradition of Gupta learning beginning in the person of the gifted and accomplished Samudra Gupta (A.D. 326 to A.D. 375), father of Vikramaditya, and a sovereign of such military ability as to be described as "an Indian Napoleon," while he himself had the fine ambition to be remembered rather for his love of music and poetry than for his success in war. In the reign of such a king, and in the personal influence of such a father, must have lain the seed of more achievements and events which
were to make his son Vikramaditya the hero of Indian tradition through subsequent ages. It takes many lives sometimes to carry out a single great task, and we can only guess whether or not Samudra Gupta began the undertakings whose completion was to make his son illustrious.
In my own opinion, the very head and front of these must have been the final recension of the Mahabharata at some time within the famous reign, say at about the year A.D. 400. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that certain of the Puranas, notably the Vishnu and Bhagavata, were edited, exactly as the Bhagavata claims, immediately after the Mahabharata by scholars who found cause for regret in the fact that work had not given them the scope required for all the details they were eager to give regarding the life of the Lord. I do not remember even to have seen any note on the social functions of the Puranas. But the Vishnu Purana strongly suggests a state curriculum of education. In the ages before printing, literature must for the mass of people in all countries have tended to take the form of a single volume —witness the name biblos or Bible, the book—containing elements of history and geography, a certain amount of general information, some current fiction, and above all an authoritative rendering of theology and morals in combination. History of course would be reduced to little more than an indication of the origin of the reigning dynasty, or a sketch of the epoch regarded at the time of writing as "modern." Geography would consist of an account of the chief pilgrimages and sacred rivers. And in the Vishnu Purana, in the stories of Dhruva and Prahlada, when compared with the infinitely superior popular versions, we have a key to the treatment which fiction and folklore would receive. As the theological exposition proceeds, one can almost see the Brahman teaching at the temple-door while the shades of evening gather, and ignoring every other consideration in his desire to put the highest philosophy into the mouth of Prahlad, or to pin a religious meaning to the astronomical picture of the child Dhruva pointed onwards by the Seven Rishis.
It would be clearly impossible for every village in the Gupta Empire to possess either a scholar learned in, or a copy of, the Mahabharata. But the scheme of culture comprised in the knowledge of the work known as the Vishnu Purana was not equally unattainable; and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the book was planned or edited as a standard of common culture. If there be anything in this suggestion, a new importance will be conceded to the question of the province or district in which each separate Purana was produced. A single touch in the Vishnu Purana is sufficient to indicate its composition in the neighbourhood of an imperial capital, such as Pataliputra must have been. This is found in the story of Hiranyakasipu taking his little son on his .knee, when he had been under tuition for some time, and putting him through his catechism. One of the questions in this catechism is extremely suggestive. "How should one deal with an enemy by whom one is vastly outnumbered?" asks the father. "Divide and attack them one by one," answers the son, evidently from his book. In Hindu literature there is no second work which can be called "national" in the same sense as the Mahabharata. The foreign reader, taking it up as sympathetic reader merely and not as scholar, is at once struck by two features; in the first place, its unity in complexity; and in the second, its constant effort to impress on its hearers the idea of a single centralised India with an heroic tradition of her own as formative and uniting impulse. It is in good sooth a monarch's dream of an imperial race. The Gupta Emperor of Pataliputra who commissioned the last recension of the great work was as conscious as Asoka before him or Akbar after of making to his people the magic statement, "India is one."
As regards the unity of the work itself, this in the case of the Mahabharata is extraordinary. That a composition so ancient in subject-matter, and so evidently complex in its derivation, should be handed down to us as one single undisputed whole, is historical evidence of the highest importance for its original promulgation in this form by some central power with ability and prestige to give it authoritative publication. The origins of the poem are hoary with antiquity. Its sources are of an infinite variety. But the Mahabharata was certainly wrought to its present shape in the shadow of a throne, and that imperial. So much is clear on the face of it to one who meets with the book for the first time in mature life.
One would naturally expect it to have existed in fragments, or at best to be current in many different versions. Indeed it is clear enough on the reading, that it has at some far past time so existed. Every here and there the end of one chapter or canto will tell a tale in one way, and the beginning of the next repeat it, or some part of it, from an utterly different point of view, as might rival narrators of a single incident. But the work of collating and examining, of assigning their definite values to each separate story, and weaving all into a single co-ordinated whole, has been done by some one great mind, some mighty hand, that went over the ground long long ago, and made the path that we of to-diy must follow still. The minute differences of reading between the Bombay and Benares texts only serve to emphasize this single and uncontested character of one immortal rendering of the great work. All through Maharashtra and the Punjab, and Bengal and Dravida-desh, the Mahabharata is the same. In every part of India and even amongst the Mohammedans in Bengal it plays one part—social, educational, man- making, and nation-building. No great man could be made in India without its influence upon his childhood. And the hero-making poem is one throughout every province of the land.
Socially the first point that strikes one, as one reads, is the curious position held by the Brahman. It is very evident that this is as yet by no means fixed. No duty with which an audience was already familiar would be so harped upon as is that of gifts to and respect for the Brahmans here. We notice too that the caste is not yet even fixed, for Draupadi is represented at her swayamvara as following the five brothers, when she and everyone else imagine them to be Brahmans. Nor is this a detail which requires explanation or apology, as does the marriage of one woman to five men. No, at the date of the last recension of the Mahabharata, a marriage between Brahman and Kshatriya is well within the understanding and sympathy of an audience. It is however fairly clear that the promulgation of the work is bound up with the success of the Brahmans in impressing themselves and it on the public mind. It was entrusted to them, perhaps by royal warrant—even as in the story of Damayanti another story is given to them to carry forth of her father's capital—to spread far and wide, depending on the alms of the faithful for payment. And we are constrained at this point to ask. What up to this moment had been the characteristic work of the Brahmans as a caste?
But there are notable exceptions to this constant commendation of the Brahmans to the consideration and charity of their hearers. On looking closer, we find that there are many passages of no inconsiderable size in which the Brahmans are never mentioned. And this feature gradually establishes itself in our minds as a very good differentia of the more modern additions. It would appear that in its earlier versions the poem contained no forced mention of this particular caste, and that, in making the final recension, some care was observed to maintain the purity of the ancient texts, even while incorporating with them new matter and new comments.
The most important question of all however is one on which a new reader will find it hard to imagine himself mistaken. This is the question as to who is the hero of the last recension. Undoubtedly the Mahabharata, as we have it, is the story of Krishna. It is difficult to understand how the theory could have been put forward that the final editing had been Saivite. On the contrary, Mahadeva is represented as speaking the praises of Krishna, while, so far as I am aware, the reverse never happens. This could only mean that Hinduism as it stood was here, in the person of Shiva, incorporating a new element, which had to be ratified and accepted by all that was already holy and authoritative. The Krishna of the national story is indeed Partha-Sarathi the Charioteer of Arjuna—most probably an earlier hero of Dwarka and the war-ballads—but every effort is made, by calling him Keshava and the slayer of Putana, to identify him with that other Krishna, hero of the Jumna, who appears to have been worshipped by the cowherds, a people still half-nomadic as it would seem, who must have been established peacefully in India some centuries before his time.
Was Krishna Partha-Sarathi, then, the deliberate preaching of the Gupta dynasty to the (at that time half-Hinduised) peoples of the south side of the Jumna? Was he a hope held out to the democracy, a place made in the national faith for newly imperialised populations? Was it at this period that the play of the Mahabharata was deliberately established as an annual Pandava-lila in the villages of the south, while to Krishna Partha-Sarathi especially temples were built in Dravida-desh? In any case, there is abundant evidence half a century later, when we pass to the reign of Skanda Gupta the grandson of Vikramaditya, of the hold which the Krishna of the Jumna had obtained over the hearts of the imperial house of Pataliputra at Bhitari.[1] In the district of Ghazipur to the west of Benares is still standing a pillar which was raised by the young king on his return from victory over the Huns in A.D. 455. He hastened to his mother, says the inscription, "just as Krishna, when he had slain his enemies, betook himself to his mother Devaki." The pillar was erected to the memory of his father— it may have marked the completion of the requiem ceremonies postponed by war —and in commemoration of the victory just gained by the protection of the gods. It was surmounted finally by a statue of the god Vishnu. This statue has now disappeared, but we may safely infer that it was of the form still common in the south of India as that of Narayana. It was probably made in low relief on a rounded panel, and depicted a beautiful youth with a lotus in his hand. In the following year 456 a great piece of engineering, so far west as the Girnar Hill, was completed and consecrated by the building of a temple of Vishnu.
Seven hundred and fifty years earlier, in the year 300 B.C., Megasthenes had noted amongst Indian religious ideas that " Herakles is worshipped at Mathura and Clisobothra." Was this latter the Hellenic pronunciation of "Klisoputa," Krisoputra, Krishnaputa? And is it to be identified with Dwarka, persistently identified with Krishna throughout the Mahabharata without any very satisfactory reason being stated—or with some other town near Mathura, since destroyed?
Now this same Herakles is a figure of wonderful interest. We must remember with regard to the period of which we are now thinking, that Greece was but the remotest province of the Central Asiatic world, and in that world the youngest child of history. Her myths and religious systems had chiefly a central Asiatic origin, and Herakles of Mediterranean fame was doubtless pre-eminently of this order. Probably little ever finds its way into literature of the human significance to human souls of any given religious system, or more particularly of the ideas connected with an ancient god or hero. We may depend upon it that Herakles of Hellas, when he was worshipped by the common folk, had more in him of the Christ who saves, more of the Krishna, lover of man, than any of us now could easily imagine.
It may be that Krishna slaying the tyrant of Mathura forms but another echo of some immeasurably ancient tale, held by future nations in common, ere the Asian tablelands or the Arctic home had poured down new-born breeds of man on the coasts of Greece and river-banks of India. So at least must it have seemed to Megasthenes, making up his despatches for Seleukos Nikator. And 700 years go by, it appears, before a Gupta emperor, who has just annexed Western India with its capital of Ujjain, commissioned the editing anew of the national epic of the north, causing it to teach that this Cliso —Kriso—Krishna of the Jumna is no other than a certain Partha-Sarathi, known this long while to Northern and Vedic India as the exponent to his disciples of all the secrets of the Upanishads. Are we to take it that the Aryan teacher cries, "Whom ye ignorantly worship. Him declare I unto you" to the tribes whom he fain would Hinduise?
Readers of the Bhagavata Purana will note that the Jumna life, that is to say, the Heraklian element in the story of Krishna, is crowded into his first twelve years and that after this he is represented as being sent to learn the Vedas. That is to say, it is at this point that he is Hinduised as the Incarnation of Vishnu. Obviously, after this had been done, many of the incidents of his childhood might have a Hindu interpretation reflected back upon them.
How great is the beauty of that divine childhood! How warm and throbbing the sense of personality that speaks in every line of the Mahabharata! In spite of the English dress, how wonderful the power and passion with which both Epic and Purana tell the tale of Krishna! How rude yet grand this ancient world out of which in its unsuspecting simplicity, in its worship of strength and heroism, comes the story of the Lord slaying demon upon demon, elephant, wrestler, tyrant, all. Centuries, maybe milleniums, will go by before the tender Hinduising interpretation will be added to each incident, "and then, offering salutation at the feet of Krishna, the soul of that evil one went forth unto bright places, for ever the touch of the Lord brought salvation, even unto those whom He appeared to slay."
Like children long ago on the Greek islands, and children and men in German Scandinavian forests, or like the peasants of to-day in Icelandic log-houses, so have the Indian people all down the centuries listened to wonder-tales of a hero who was vulnerable at no point save on the soles of his feet; of mortals who went armed with divine weapons; of that strong one who could gulp down the forest-fire like water; of the woman who peeped and saw between her eyelids; of madness sent by the gods upon whole peoples whom they would slay; of dooms and destinies and strange heroic whispers from the twilight of the world.
But nowhere, it seems to me, does the enthusiasm of the story carry us so completely away as when we read at last of the ascension of Krishna into heaven. Here we are dealing with nothing pre-historic. Here we have the genius of a great Hindu poet in full flight. All that the ecclesiasticism of the West has done in fifteen centuries to place the like incident in the Christian story in an exquisite mystical light, half-veiled by its own glory, was here anticipated by some unnamed writer of the Gupta era in India, in or before the year a.d. 400, ending the story of the Incarnation on a note of mingled love and triumph :
"And He the Lord, passing through the midst of Heaven, ascended up into His own inconceivable region. Then did all the immortals join together to sing His praises. The gods and the rishis likewise offered salutation. And Indra also, the king of Heaven, hymned Him right joyfully."
- ↑ Vincent Smith. Early History of India, pp. 267-8.