Fields of Blood (10 page)

We do not know exactly how the Aryans established their two kingdoms in the Doab, the “Land of the Arya,” but they can only have done so by force. Events may well have conformed to what social historians call the
“conquest theory” of state establishment.
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Peasants have much to lose from warfare, which destroys their crops and kills their livestock. When the economically poorer but militarily superior Aryans attacked them, it is possible that, rather than suffer this devastation, some of the more pragmatic peasants decided to submit to the raiders and offer them part of their surplus instead. For their part, the raiders learned not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, since they could acquire a steady income by returning to the village to demand more goods. Over time this robbery may have been institutionalized to become regular tribute. Once the
Yadavas and
Kuru-
Panchalas subjugated enough villages in the Doab in this way, they had become in effect aristocratic rulers of agrarian kingdoms, though they still dispatched annual raiding parties to the east.

This transition to agrarian life meant major social change. We can only speculate, of course, but up to this point it seems that Aryan society had not been rigidly stratified: the lesser clansmen fought alongside their chieftains, and priests often took part in the raiding.
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But with agriculture came specialization. The Aryans found that they now had to integrate the dasas, the native farmers with agricultural knowhow, into their community, so the Vritra myths demonizing the dasas were becoming obsolete, since without their labor and expertise, the agrarian economy would fail. The demands of production also meant that Aryans themselves had to toil in the fields, while others became carpenters, metalsmiths, potters, tanners, and weavers. They would now stay at home, while the best warriors were dispatched to fight in the east. There were probably power struggles between the rajas, who wielded power, and the priests, who gave it legitimacy. Breaking with centuries of tradition, all these innovations had to be grafted onto the
Vedic mythos.

Their new wealth and leisure gave the priests more time for contemplation, and they began to refine their concept of divinity. They had always seen the gods as participating in a loftier, more encompassing reality that was Being itself, which by the tenth century they had started to call
Brahman
(“The All”).
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Brahman was the power that held the cosmos together and enabled it to grow and develop. It was nameless, indefinable, and utterly transcendent. Devas were simply different manifestations of the Brahman: “They call him Indra, Mitra,
Naruna, Agni, and he is heavenly noble-winged Garatman. To what is One, sages give many a title.”
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With almost forensic determination, the new breed of rishis were intent on discovering this mysterious unifying principle;
the all-too-human devas were not only a distraction but were becoming an embarrassment: they concealed rather than revealed the Brahman. Nobody, one rishi insisted, not even the highest of the gods, knows how our world came into being.
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The old stories of Indra slaying a monster to order the cosmos now seemed positively infantile.
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Gradually the gods’ personalities began to shrink.
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One of these later hymns also gave sacred endorsement to the new stratification of Aryan society.
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Another rishi meditated on the ancient myth of the king whose sacrificial death had given birth to the cosmos and whom the rishi called
Purusha, the primordial “Person.” He described Purusha lying down on the freshly mown grass of the ritual arena and allowing the gods to kill him. His corpse was then dismembered and became the components of the universe: birds, animals, horses, cattle, heaven and earth, sun and moon, and even the great devas Agni and Indra, all emerged from different parts of his body. Yet only 25 percent of Purusha’s being formed the finite world; the other 75 percent was unaffected by time and mortality, transcendent and illimitable. There would always be something in the human experience of the natural world that would elude our comprehension. In Purusha’s self-surrender, the old cosmic battles and agonistic sacred contests were replaced by a myth in which there was no fighting: the king gave himself away without a struggle.

The new social classes of the Aryan kingdom also sprouted from Purusha’s body:

Thus the newly stratified society, the hymn claimed, was not a dangerous break with the egalitarian past but was as old as the universe itself. Aryan society was now divided into four social classes—the seed of the elaborate caste system that would develop later. Each class (
varna
) had its own sacred “duty” (
dharma
). Nobody could perform the task allotted
to another class, any more than a star could leave its path and encroach on a planet’s circuit.

Sacrifice was still fundamental; members of each varna had to give up their own preferences for the sake of the whole. It was the dharma of the
Brahmins, who came from Purusha’s mouth, to preside over the rituals of society.
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For the first time in Aryan history, the warriors now formed a distinct class called the rajanya, a new term in the
Rig
Veda; later they would be known as
Kshatriya (“the empowered ones”). They came from Purusha’s arms, chest, and heart, the seat of strength, courage, and energy, and their dharma was daily to put their lives at risk. This was a significant development, because it limited violence in the Aryan community. Hitherto all able-bodied men had been fighters and aggression the raison d’être of the entire tribe. The hymn acknowledged that the rajanya was indispensable, because the kingdom could not survive without force and coercion. But henceforth
only
the rajanya could bear arms. Members of the other three classes—Brahmins, vaishyas, and shudras—now had to relinquish violence and were no longer allowed to take part in raids nor fight in their kingdom’s wars.

In the two lower classes we see the systemic violence of this new society. They came from Purusha’s legs and feet, the lower and largest part of the body; their dharma was to serve, to run errands for the nobility, and bear the weight of the entire social frame, performing the productive labor on which the agrarian kingdom depended.
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The dharma of the vaishya, the ordinary clansman, now forbidden to fight, was food production; the Kshatriya
aristocracy would now confiscate his surplus. The vaishya was thus associated with fertility and productivity but also, being taken from a place close to Purusha’s genitals, with carnal appetite, which, according to the two upper classes, made him unreliable. But the most significant development was the introduction of the shudra: the dasa at the base of the social body was now defined as a “slave,” one who labors for others, performing the most menial tasks and therefore stigmatized as impure. In Vedic law, the vaishya was to be oppressed; however, the shudra could be removed or slain at will.
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The Purusha Hymn thus acknowledged the structural violence that lay at the heart of the new Aryan civilization. The new system may have limited fighting and raiding to one of the privileged classes, but it implied that the forcible subjugation of vaishya and shudra was part of the sacred order of the universe. For the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, the new Aryan
aristocracy, productive work was not their dharma, so they had the leisure to explore the arts and sciences. While sacrifice was expected of everybody, the greatest sacrifice was demanded of the lower classes, condemned to a life of servitude and stigmatized as inferior, base, and impure.
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The Aryan conversion to agriculture continued. By about 900 BCE, there were several rudimentary kingdoms in the Land of the Arya. Thanks to the switch from wheat cultivation to wet rice production, the kingdoms enjoyed a larger surplus. Our knowledge of life in these emerging states is limited, but again, mythology and ritual can throw some light on the developing political organization. In these embryonic kingdoms, the raja, though still elected by his Kshatriya peers like a tribal chieftain, was well on his way to becoming a powerful agrarian ruler and was now invested with divine attributes during his yearlong royal consecration, the
rajasuya.
During this ceremony, another Kshatriya challenged the new king, who had to win his realm back in a ritualized game of dice. If he lost, he was forced into exile but would return with an army to unseat his rival. If he won, he downed a draught of soma and led a raid into the neighboring territories, and when he returned laden with plunder, the
Brahmins acknowledged his kingship: “Thou, O King, art Brahman.” The raja was now “The All,” the hub of the wheel that pulled his kingdom together and enabled it to prosper and expand.

A king’s chief duty was to conquer new arable land, a duty sacralized by the horse sacrifice (
ashvameda
), in which a white stallion was consecrated, set free, and allowed to roam unmolested for a year, accompanied by the king’s army who were supposed to protect it. A stabled horse will always make straight for home, however, so the army was in fact driving the horse into territory that the king was intent on conquering.
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Thus in India, as in any agrarian civilization, violence was woven into the texture of aristocratic life.
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Nothing was nobler than death in battle. To die in his bed was a sin against the Kshatriya’s dharma, and if he felt that he was losing his strength, he was expected to seek out death in the field.
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A commoner had no right to fight, however, so if he died on the battlefield, his death was regarded as a monstrous departure from the norm—or even a joke.
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