Incarnations Read online

  Historians of India often focus on the country’s westward connections—the overland “Silk Road” to central Asia and beyond, and later colonial and commercial ties with Europe. Often missed are the adventuresome seaborne links Chola rulers forged between South India and Southeast Asia and China. Trade-minded Tamil sailors had mastered the currents and monsoon winds. They raced their pearls and spices and their textiles (a major industry in Tamil Nadu today) across the Bay of Bengal, which was then known as the Chola Lake or Chola Sea. The traders would return laden with camphor, metals, and Chinese porcelain, fragments of which archaeologists continue to find along the shores of southeastern India. Ships moving goods between the Arab world and China would also harbor at Nagapattinam, a port south of today’s Chennai—stops that gave Rajaraja and his successors the chance to impose lucrative taxes on the precious cargo.

  In addition, Rajaraja pulled off something no Indian ruler before him seems to have done: commandeering timber trading boats, he launched maritime expeditions, bringing far-flung wealth back home to the Coromandel Coast. Then, as now, the China trade was a prize, and the Cholas competed for it fiercely with the Buddhist rulers of Srivijaya in Sumatra, whose port was a rival transit point. This wasn’t always commercial competition. Rajaraja also sent expeditions to northern Sri Lanka to ransack Buddhist temples. According to the Culavamsa, a twelfth-century chronicle from the island, the capital at Anuradhapura, a great religious center that housed relics of the Buddha, was “utterly destroyed.” “Like bloodsucking yakkhas,” the text goes on, the Cholas “took all the treasures of Lanka for themselves.”

  Rajaraja was also vacuuming up wealth from mainland India. He assembled mercenaries (archers, spearmen, and swordsmen) and troops of elephants to plunder treasure from neighboring southern kingdoms. Though it’s likely to have been a face-saving exaggeration by the defeated, an inscription found in one of these conquered realms speaks of nine hundred thousand pillaging Chola troops.

  Closer to home, his beneficence was underwritten by the riches of a territory that stretched inland from the Coromandel Coast to the Kaveri basin. “Even though it’s in a sort of tropical zone, it’s a rather dryish part of the world, but with this great river flowing through it,” George Michell says; “with irrigation, the region was able to yield huge amounts of produce—and the Cholas were able to command the management of water. The population was extremely dense, as it continues to be today, and there was a lot of wealth from the land.” (Control of the Kaveri continues too to be of critical importance; Tamil Nadu has been in a dispute with its western neighbor Karnataka over how to distribute the river’s waters since at least the nineteenth century.) Temple inscriptions show that Rajaraja used temple functionaries to organize revenue collection, accumulating the proceeds within the sacred building.

  In fact, from what we can tell about his administration, the temple was his throne as well as his storehouse and shrine. Although Tanjore has a palace, it dates from a much later period, when Maratha Nayak kings ruled; Rajaraja ran his kingdom from within the godly precinct. “The temple received land grants from the king, and from the higher levels of chiefs and officers,” Champakalakshmi says. “And it becomes the landlord who redistributes these resources to people who serve the temple in various ways—from the priestly group right down to the sweepers, the lowest group of workers, all of whom have a place in temple society.” Thus, economically and socially, as much as religiously, Rajaraja’s monument became a microcosm, an ideal image, of the sort of empire he was fashioning.

  * * *

  Some see the period of Rajaraja’s reign, which ended with his death in 1014, as initiating an era when the center of gravity of Indian history moved southward. Certainly, his legacy—the Thanjavur temple, the Chola bronzes, his pioneering maritime expeditions—remains unsurpassed in some respects. Taller temples were eventually built, and there have been many other patrons of Indian art, but perhaps few other Indian kings worked quite as hard as Rajaraja to capture the imagination of those over whom they ruled.

  A thousand years after Rajaraja, wielding such power is still a South Indian art. Even today in this region, boon-dispensing leaders have their own devotional cults, and people will tell you that the politics of Tamil Nadu remain different from those in the rest of the country. For a start, people here are sometimes willing to die for their leaders. When the state’s chief minister Jayalalithaa was imprisoned in 2014 on charges of corruption and had to resign her position, newspapers reported the deaths of more than 150 people—many of shock, but around 40 by their own hand. On Jayalalithaa’s first birthday out of power, another supporter nailed himself to a cross in ritual crucifixion. Nowhere else in India do politicians inspire such cultish passion. When Mumbai’s Bal Thackeray, revered by many of his fellow Maharashtrians, died in 2012, authorities geared up for a wave of public violence and sympathy deaths. Nothing happened.

  Jayalalithaa has since been acquitted on appeal. Whether or not she was venal, she successfully cultivated an image of magnanimous bounty: distributing to her people televisions, motorbikes, and school fees for girls. They call her Amma, “Mother”—and to many, her qualities make her divine. One poster put up after her conviction asked, “Can a mortal punish God?”

  It takes me back to those paintings of Rajaraja near the inner sanctum of his temple, which show him worshipping but also making himself an object of worship. Did he invent this cult of the leader in the Tamil lands, or had he tapped into a current that was already, quietly, coursing through them?

  10

  BASAVA

  A Voice in the Air

  Twelfth century CE

  Make of my body the beam of a lute

  of my head the sounding gourd

  of my nerves the strings

  of my fingers the plucking rods.

  Clutch me close

  and play your thirty-two songs

  O lord of the meeting rivers!

  These sensuous lines to the god Shiva were left to us by the twelfth-century poet Basava, a religious guru of revolutionary ideas who preached the immorality of caste and the intrinsic value of people who happened to be born poor. His deceptively simple verses were written in Kannada, a Dravidian language of the south, spoken by some fifty million Indians today, but we can read many of them now in the beautiful translations of the twentieth-century poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan.

  Over the centuries, Basava’s words have inspired many other Indian poets, writers, and dramatists—and some very British poets, too, including Ted Hughes. Hughes found in Ramanujan’s translations of Basava a voice so uncannily natural that it reminded the famously immodest Hughes of himself. He said he heard in Basava the sort of poetry he, Hughes, wrote when young and relatively unstudied—a style that moved like “a voice in the air.”

  Today, Basava himself is a bit like a voice in the air. As scholars dispute the dates and details of his life, his followers speak of him in reverent fables; to them he is known more respectfully as Basavana, “Elder Brother,” or even Basaveswara, “Lord Basava.” His verses, though, are what explain him best. They have a directness that reveals an independent thinker, social reformer, and religious teacher who sometimes struggled to resist worldly temptations. Each of his poems evokes his passionate devotion to Shiva—“lord of the meeting rivers,” as Basava called him—and leaves classical formality behind.

  I don’t know anything like time-beats and metre

  Nor the arithmetic of strings and drums:

  I don’t know the count of iamb and dactyl

  My lord of the meeting rivers,

  As nothing will hurt you

  I’ll sing as I love.

  “I’ll sing as I love”: no high language, just an open invitation to all—including the unlettered. This informal, almost spoken quality, joined to unconventional or even anticonventional politics, is why the twelfth-century guru speaks so powerfully to many writers in India today. Girish Karnad, a leading playwright, is one of them:


  The marvellous thing about Basava and his followers was that they rejected any kind of permanent structures. They wanted to be continually moving, they wanted to be continually changing, they wanted to continually respond to life. They seem modern because, for a start, the idioms are entirely living and colloquial. They’re not trying to impress anyone with their scholarship or their knowledge. They are just talking. And, because these poets are talking to people, they seem as they would have seemed to the people of that period. That’s what makes them modern.

  * * *

  Basava’s early life, as told in legend, is a characteristically Indian story of a spiritual search. Like the Buddha (1) or Mahavira (2), the hero renounces his high birth, leaves home, and wanders, before finding enlightenment. Basava was born in the early 1100s, in today’s Karnataka. We’re told that his parents, high-caste Brahmins, died young. He was raised by his extended family and trained in the Sanskrit tradition, but something pushed him to question their orthodox beliefs. He left home around the age of sixteen with an emphatic gesture. According to at least one version of the story, he didn’t just cut ties with his family; he literally cut the sacred thread Brahmins wear to represent their “twice-born” status.

  At Kudalasangama, one of the great rivers of the south, the Krishna, receives a smaller tributary, the Malaprabha. From bank to bank, the confluence is about a mile wide. Basava spent several years here in spiritual retreat. “Lord of the meeting rivers”: the phrase became a regular refrain in his verses because it was at this river juncture, or sangam, that he discovered his personal god.

  Yet Basava’s spiritualism had a worldly edge. He eventually moved to the city of Kalyana and became, of all things, an accountant. Marrying strategically, he rose to the rank of chief treasurer to the local king. But as with Wallace Stevens, insurance executive, or T. S. Eliot, bank clerk, or Philip Larkin, librarian, the day job belied the fullness of the life.

  * * *

  In the West, poetry is sometimes seen as an indulgence. In India, however, it’s been an essential medium of thought—partly because for much of the subcontinent’s history few had pen and paper or the opportunity to know their uses. Instead, Indians had to think in rhythm and meter so that thought became memorable, able to carry through time and space mathematics, philosophy, and political and religious ideas. And across Indian history, poetic verse has been a central medium of intellectual expression. It also became a means of political assertion and social critique.

  Basava’s ideas and his spiritual devotion, as well as the difficulty of achieving it, are expressed in his vachanas, a rhythmic form of poetic prose that developed in the Kannada language and that Basava perfected.

  Like a monkey on a tree

  it leaps from branch to branch

  how can I believe or trust

  this burning thing, this heart?

  It will not let me go

  to my father,

  my lord of the meeting rivers.

  Kalyana became the center of the vachana movement and Basava its leader. The poets of this tradition, who came mostly from the lower castes and included a number of women, were known as vachanakaras, “makers of utterances”—an appropriately artisanal description. The vachana poets embraced the local language, Kannada, not the customary literary language, Sanskrit. In the adamantine Sanskrit tradition of religious texts in which Basava was raised, the emphasis is on sruti—what is heard or received from the priest or pandit. But vachana signifies what is said—a direct address, immediate and unrefracted. “If one speaks,” Basava wrote, “it should be like a dagger of ‘crystal.’”

  You are a blacksmith if you heat the iron,

  A washerman if you wash clothes

  A weaver if you lay the warp

  A Brahmin if you read the Vedas.

  False, utterly false, are the stories of divine birth.

  The higher type of man is the man

  Who knows himself.

  At Kalyana, Basava’s double life multiplied: in addition to being a treasurer and poet, he also emerged as the chief teacher of the proselytizing community of Virashaivas (“militants of Shiva”). The movement’s origins are obscure, and its philosophy sometimes esoteric, but it clearly had a disruptive practical force. All over Kudalasangama and some parts of Karnataka there are romantic images, icons, and drawings of Basava: an open, ardent face, with a mustache befitting a poetic revolutionary, and three horizontal tilak markings on his forehead that declare him a follower of Shiva.

  Basava and the Virashaivas considered all members of their community equal. They mocked religious authority and social order, finding an alternative source of power in individual devotion, open to all. Strikingly, given that this was the twelfth century, women got the same treatment as men—at least in theory. Each kind, each caste, and each individual was considered deserving of dignity and respect.

  The crookedness of the serpent

  is straight enough for the snake-hole.

  The crookedness of the river

  is straight enough for the sea.

  And the crookedness of our Lord’s men

  is straight enough for our Lord!

  The object of Basava’s ridicule was not just high Brahminism, but also the skittishness of folk beliefs. Those who saw gods in their pots, combs, bowstrings, and cups would be mocked.

  To some postcolonial critics, A. K. Ramanujan, whose modern translations in the volume Speaking of Siva brought Basava and other vachana poets back to life in the English language, gave an overly modern interpretation of those poets’ work—portraying them almost as individual dissenters in the Protestant mold. It’s a caution worth considering. Yet in many translations, Basava’s verses speak of struggle and self-doubt, and of his antiestablishment devotional community, which believed in direct service to God, not to political or priestly power. In this, some see Virashaivism as a strand of the bhakti tradition, one of India’s most powerful religious forms of popular social reform and change (see 12, Kabir, and 15, Mirabai).

  Bhakti was a periodically resurgent tradition that motivated a deep devotion. Like the vachana poets, the bhakti saints and their followers rejected the idea that God could be accessed only through the Sanskrit-uttering Brahmins. Instead, they spoke proudly in India’s common, everyday languages. (The name bhakti comes from the word bhaj, which means “to share,” and bhakti worship often took congregational forms quite different from orthodox rituals.)

  Bhakti could be a hard path. Even as Basava cajoled people into finding their own personal relationships with God, he was candid about the psychological anguish it caused. When a twelfth-century follower chose to estrange him- or herself so arrantly from social convention, there was usually no going back.

  Don’t you take on

  This thing called bhakti

  Like a saw

  It cuts when it goes

  And it cuts again

  When it comes.

  * * *

  The flow of the Krishna River has now been altered by the Almatti Dam, completed in 2005, which submerged many of the fields around Kudalasangama. Yet the engineers managed to save Basava’s samadhi, his last resting place—and even give it an added mystery. At the bottom of a deep spiral stairwell, about forty meters below the sangam where the two rivers join, is a canopied memorial, where people come to pray and make offerings to Basava.

  Today, the memory of Basava and his teachings is maintained by a substantial religious community called the Lingayats. To what might have been Basava’s consternation, they function as a caste group, with their own internal hierarchy. There are some seven or eight million followers, concentrated in northern Karnataka. The name Lingayat comes from the lingam (in this case, a small polished stone or phallic object symbolizing Shiva) which members of the community wear in a pouch around their necks. Though a religious minority, they are a force in Karnataka’s electoral politics.

  Near the end of Basava’s life, his radicalism proved his personal undoing. In challenging the
social and political order, he took a step too far and sanctioned an intercaste marriage. The marriage was to join two children from his community of followers: a boy, born an outcaste, and a girl, born a Brahmin. The orders from his offended king were brutal. Members of the wedding party had their eyes gouged out. Their bodies were trampled by elephants in the streets. Rioting ensued as Basava’s outraged followers ignored their guru’s pleas not to turn violent. Before long, the king was murdered, the Virashaiva community was scattered, and a broken Basava fled the city. His death came shortly after.

  The episode is the subject of a play, Taledanda, by Girish Karnad. He explains:

  I wrote the play in 1990, when there were caste riots going on in North India, and it seemed absolutely relevant, because many of the issues are issues that are still alive today. You see, the whole idea of egalitarianism, of caste, everyone being together, was beautiful in theory. Everyone loved it. But what happened is that they made the mistake of putting it into practice, and a Brahmin girl was married to a lower-caste boy from the cobbler community. Now if it was the other way round, it’s okay—Brahmins are allowed to marry women from lower castes. But this was unthinkable, and there was a tremendous reaction against this wedding. The whole movement came to an end overnight just like that, because of that one wedding. It’s a very fascinating episode, because it could happen today. It’s still very raw. That’s what makes Basava’s vachanas so relevant.

  In some of his vachanas, Basava notes how arbitrary the gods could be at the end of a man’s life. No number of rituals or generous deeds could guarantee favor, because the gods would do as they damned well pleased. Still, he mused about his inability to curry last-minute favor with Shiva in the royal way: by furiously building temples, as a rajaraja, or “king of kings,” might do.