Fields of Blood (11 page)

Yet during the ninth century, some of the Brahmins in the
Kuru
kingdom began yet another major reinterpretation of ancient Aryan tradition and embarked on a reform that not only systematically extracted all violence from religious ritual but even persuaded the Kshatriyas to change their ways. Their ideas were recorded in the scriptures known as the
Brahmanas, which date from the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE. There would be no more crowded potlatches or rowdy, drunken contests. In this entirely new ritual, the patron (who paid for the sacrifice) was now the only layman present and was guided through the elaborate ceremony by four priests. Ritualized raids and mock battles were replaced by anodyne chants and symbolic gestures, although traces of the old violence remained: a gentle hymn bore the incongruous title “The Chariot of the Devas,” and a stately antiphon was compared to Indra’s deadly mace, which the singers were hurling back and forth “with loud voices.”
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Finally, in the reformed
Agnicayana ritual, instead of fighting for new territory, the patron simply picked up the fire pot, took three steps to the east, and put it down again.
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We know very little about the motivation that lay behind this reform movement. According to one scholar, it sprang from the insoluble conundrum that the sacrificial ritual, which was designed to give life, actually involved death and destruction. The rishis could not eliminate military violence from society, but they could strip it of religious legitimacy.
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There was also a new concern about cruelty to animals. In one of the later poems of the
Rig Veda, a rishi tenderly soothes the horse about to be slaughtered in the ashvameda:

The Brahmanas described animal sacrifice as cruel, recommending that the beast be spared and given as a gift to an officiating priest.
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If it had to be killed, the animal should be dispatched as painlessly as possible. In the old days the victim’s decapitation had been the dramatic climax of the sacrifice; now the animal was suffocated in a shed at a distance from the sacrificial area.
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Some scholars, however, contend that the reform was
driven not by a revulsion from violence per se; rather, violence was now experienced as polluting, and anxious to avoid defilement, priests preferred to delegate the task to assistants who killed the victim outside the sacred ground.
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Whatever their motivation, the reformers were beginning to create a climate of opinion that looked askance at violence.

They also directed the patron’s attention toward his inner world. Instead of inflicting death on the hapless animal, he was now instructed to assimilate death, experiencing it internally in a symbolic rite.
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During the ceremony, his death was enacted ritually and enabled him for a time to enter the world of the immortal gods. A more internal spirituality was beginning to emerge, one closer to what we call “religion”; and it was rooted in a desire to avoid violence. Instead of mindlessly going through the motions of external rituals, participants were required to become aware of the hidden significance of the rites, making themselves conscious of the connections that, in the logic of the
perennial philosophy, linked every single action, liturgical utensil, and mantra to a divine reality. Gods were assimilated with humans, humans with animals and plants, the transcendent with the immanent, and the visible with the invisible.
⁴⁷

This was not simply self-indulgent make-believe but part of the endless human endeavor to endow the smallest details of life with meaning. Ritual, it has been said, creates a controlled environment in which, for a while, we lay aside the inescapable flaws of our mundane existence. Yet by so doing we paradoxically become acutely aware of them. After the ceremony, when we return to daily life, we can recall our experience of the way things ought to be. Ritual is, therefore, the creation of fallible human beings who can never fully realize their ideals.
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So while the day-to-day world of the Aryans was inherently violent, cruel, and unjust, in these new rites participants had the chance to inhabit—if only temporarily—a world from which aggression was rigorously excluded. Kshatriyas could not abandon the violence of their dharma, because society depended on it. But as we will see, some began to become painfully aware of the taint that the warrior had always carried in Aryan society, ever since
Indra had been called a “sinner.” Some would build on the experience of the new rituals to create an alternative spirituality that would undermine the aggressive martial ethos.

But in the new segmented society, very few people now took part in
the Vedic rites, which had become the preserve of the
aristocracy. Most lower-class Aryans made simpler offerings to their favorite devas in their own home and worshipped a variety of gods—some adopted from the indigenous population—which would form the multifarious
Hindu pantheon that would finally emerge during the Gupta period (320–540 CE). But the most spectacular rituals, such as the royal consecration, would make an impression on the public, and people would talk about them for a long time. They also helped to support the class system. The priest who performed the rites was able to assert his superiority over the raja or Kshatriya patron and thus maintain his place at the head of the body politic. In turn, the raja, who paid for the sacrifice, could invoke divine authority to extract more of the surplus from the vaishyas.

If these infant kingdoms were to become mature states, the king’s authority could no longer depend on a sacrificial system based on reciprocal exchange. In the
Punjab all the booty and captured cattle had been ritually redistributed and consumed, so the raja had been unable to accumulate wealth independently. But a more developed state required resources of its own to pay for its bureaucracy and institutions. Now, thanks to the massive increase of agricultural productivity in the Doab, the rajas were becoming rich. They controlled the agrarian surplus and were no longer dependent on booty acquired in a raid and ceremonially distributed among the community. They were, therefore, becoming not only economically but politically independent of the
Brahmins, who had once presided over and regulated the distribution of resources.

By the sixth century BCE, the Aryans had reached the eastern Gangetic basin, a region with higher rainfall and even greater agricultural yield. They were now able to grow rice, fruit, cereal, sesame, millet, wheat, grains, barley, and with this enhanced surplus, support more elaborate states.
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As more powerful rajas conquered smaller chiefdoms, sixteen large kingdoms emerged, including
Magadha in the northeast of the Gangetic plain and
Koshala in the southwest, all competing with one another for scarce resources. The priests still insisted that it was their rituals and sacrifices that preserved the cosmic and social order,
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but the religious texts acknowledged that in reality the political system depended on coercion:

We lack the archaeological evidence to know much about the organization of these kingdoms, however; here too we have to rely on religious texts, especially the
Buddhist scriptures, which were composed and preserved orally and not committed to writing until the first century CE.

An entirely different polity, however, had emerged in the foothills of the
Himalayas and on the edge of the Ganges plain: the
gana-
sanghas
or “tribal republics” that rejected
monarchy and were ruled by assemblies of clan chieftains. They may have been founded by independent-minded aristocrats, who were unhappy with the
autocracy of the kingdoms and wanted to live in a more egalitarian community. The tribal republics rejected Vedic orthodoxy and had no interest in paying for expensive sacrifices; instead they invested in
trade, agriculture, and warfare, and power was wielded not by a king but by a small ruling class.
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Because they had no priestly caste, there were only two classes: a Kshatriya
aristocracy and the
dasa-karmakaru,
“slaves and laborers,” who had no rights or access to resources, although it was possible for enterprising merchants and artisans to achieve higher social status. With their large standing armies, the tribal republics were a significant challenge to the Aryan kingdoms and proved to be remarkably resilient, surviving well into the middle of the first millennium CE.
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Clearly their independence and at least nominal
egalitarianism appealed to something fundamental in the
Indian psyche.

The kingdoms and sanghas were both still mainly reliant on agriculture, but the Ganges region was also experiencing a commercial revolution, which produced a
merchant class and a money economy. Cities linked by new roads and canals—
Savatthi,
Saketa,
Kosambi,
Varanasi,
Rajagaha, and
Changa—were becoming centers of industry and business. This challenged the structural violence of the class system, since
most of the nouveau riche merchants and bankers were vaishyas, and some were even shudras.
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A new class of “untouchables” (
chandalas
), who had been thrown off their land by the incoming Aryans, now took the place of these aspiring workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
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City life was exciting. The streets were crowded with brightly painted carriages and huge elephants carrying merchandise from distant lands. People of all classes and ethnicities mingled freely in the marketplace, and new ideas began to challenge the traditional Vedic system. The
Brahmins, therefore, whose roots were in the countryside, began to seem irrelevant.
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As often in times of flux, a new spirituality emerged, and it had three interrelated themes:
dukkha, moksha,
and
karma.
Surprisingly, despite this prosperity and progress, pessimism was deep and widespread. People were experiencing life as
dukkha
—“unsatisfactory,” “flawed,” and “awry.” From the trauma of birth to the agony of death, human existence seemed fraught with suffering, and even death brought no relief because everything and everybody was caught up in an inescapable cycle (
samsara
) of
rebirth, so the whole distressing scenario had to be endured again and again. The great eastward migration had been fueled by the Aryans’ experience of claustrophobic confinement in the
Punjab; now they felt imprisoned in their overcrowded cities. It was not just a feeling: rapid
urbanization typically leads to
epidemics, particularly when the population rises above 300,000, a sort of tipping point for contagion.
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No wonder the Aryans were obsessed by sickness, suffering, and death and longed to find a way out.

Rapid change of circumstance also made people more conscious of cause and effect. They could now see how the actions of one generation affected the next, and they began to believe that their deeds (
karma
) would also determine their next existence: if they were guilty of bad karma in this life, they would be reborn as slaves or animals, but with good karma, they might become kings or even gods next time. Merit was something that could be earned, accumulated, and finally “realized” in the same way as mercantile wealth.
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But even if you were reborn as a god, there was no real escape from life’s dukkha, because even gods had to die and would be reborn to lower status. In an attempt to shore up the now-vulnerable class system, perhaps, the Brahmins tried to reconfigure the concepts of karma and samsara: you could enjoy a good rebirth only if you strictly observed the dharma of your class.
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