The Epic-Puranic Literature
To say that the brahmin’s role in Indian society (which naturally excluded to some extent social enclaves like the Jains and the Buddhists) was defined by taking care of the religious needs of people does not actually restrict religion itself to what the brahmin had to offer.
In other words, the brahmin’s religion—however prestigious and normative it may be in itself—is only one expression of ancient Indian religion. Precisely because other types of religion were current even in early Aryan society, brahmin religion remained flexible, fluid and integrative. The brahmin received and moulded all kinds of religion which thereby acquired respectability and social standing.Where now were such other types found, who were their guardians and what was their content? Given the state of our knowledge about ancient India, such questions are not easy to answer. We may begin by shifting our focus away from the brahmin to the members of the second class (varna), the ksatriyas or warriors. This may take us by surprise, for we would not immediately suspect the existence of additional types of religion in this social group. But already the Upanisads showed a number of cases where a brahmin approached a ksatriya for information on brahman. And although both the Mahavira and the Buddha opted out of their conventional lives, they did so as members of ksatriya clans. These initial considerations can be complemented by the following points.
We must imagine the political situation in northern India during the first half of the last millennium âñå to have been extremely loose and undefined. Scattered all over the region were pockets and enclaves of Aryan settlements, which were particularly dense in the area known as the Aryavarta. This is the region between the rivers Jumna and Ganges in central north India, and somewhat further east along the Ganges.
To say that Aryan society was split up into various ‘tribes’ would give rise to confusion, in so far as we have used the word ‘tribe’ to denote indigenous peoples outside the Aryan influence. To speak of‘nations’ or ‘states’ would introduce an anachronism, since it suggests a centralisation of political control and a solidity of the political unit that began to emerge only from the fifth century âñå onwards. Perhaps the word ‘clan’ may be used here. Whatever the precise status of the rulers of these clans may have been, these ‘kings’ (rajas) maintained courts and a court culture. In a world that was surrounded and pervaded by non-Aryan peoples, an awareness ofa common Aryan bond was cultivated by the clans, not least through marriage ties binding together different ‘royal courts’. But central to our discussion is the role of the siita, the royal bard.This bard was the professional expert in epic literature, or better, epic culture. Naturally, this included an element of public entertainment; but he also conveyed learning of all kinds in subjects useful to a ruler and his court. Above all, it was an important means of maintaining the awareness of the common Aryan bond between the clans, and of spelling out the position of the dynasties in the history of the world. And it is this last mentioned characteristic which accounts for the fact that the literature which eventually evolved from these bardic performances must be considered to be one of the most important textual documents of the Indian religions, particularly Hinduism. Conventionally this literature is referred to as the Epics and the Puranas, but how it came about is quite a long and complicated story. The following is a tentative summary of it.
Like the Vedic literature, the performances of the royal bards were not written down, at least not for many centuries. But unlike the Vedic counterpart, we are not dealing here with fixed material that was transmitted in a meticulously accurate and verbatim form.
But it was certainly not the case that every bard, at every performance, made up the whole. Instead we must assume a number of thematic cycles, each one at least in outline fixed. In addition there were ‘skeleton stanzas’ which the bard knew by heart and around which he could improvise his narrative. Of particular importance in the history of Indian religion were four such thematic cycles, two involving all the clans, and the other two being originally purely local. Thus we have cycle A which deals with the memories, surely partly historical, of a particularly devastating war which two rival groups of Aryan clans fought. The cause of this war was a controversy over dynastic succession, and its extremely destructive outcome left deep wounds in the people’s memories. We hear about two groups of cousins, the five Pandavas (including Yudhisthira and Arjuna) and the hundred Kauravas (led by Duryodhana). The former are the rightful heirs to the kingship, but lose in a game of dice their title (and common wife) for a number of years. It is when their period of exile has come to an end that the Kauravas’ obstinacy in holding on to royal power necessitates the devastating war. The Pandavas do win, but it is a painful victory in view of the large-scale bloodshed.Cycle B was primarily concerned with the genealogies of the various Aryan dynasties and the heroic deeds of outstanding members of them. The intention here was clearly to offer the kind of reference which, in theory, should make bloodshed over dynastic disputes unnecessary. Moreover, a wider frame is provided here for the histories of the Aryan kings. Not only did the clans intermarry, but their common origins were traced back to the very beginning of the world, to the first man, Manu. This offered in turn the opportunity to deal with such religious matters as the ‘creation’ of the world itself, its evolution and its final destiny.
Cycle C takes us to the town of Ayodhya (near the modem Oudh); again the central theme is that of dynastic dispute over succession.
But elements comparable to those of the fairy-tale are also mixed into it. Due to a promise made by the king to one of his minor queens, his son Rama, although the legitimate heir to the throne, has to go with his wife Sita into exile. During this stay in the forest, Sita is abducted by an ogre Ravana. Accompanied by an army of monkeys, Rama marches to Lanka, the island stronghold of the ogre, and rescues her. Moreover, all ends well when he finally recovers his kingship.Cycle D finally takes us to the town of Mathura, where a vicious usurper Kamsa is threatening the life of the legitimate crown prince, Krsna, who is his nephew. The latter grows up secretly in the forests among cowherds. There he reveals supernatural strength by warding off dangers from the herdsmen, and equally supernatural handsomeness which infatuates all the girls and women. Eventually he defeats the usurper in Mathura, and various other kings in the Aryavarta who are Kamsa’s allies.
This simple list of four thematic cycles is merely an abstract attempt at reconstructing something like a starting-point for the extremely complex history of bardic-epic literature in India. What makes it so complicated is the fact that all four cycles have had their independent developments, while at the same time an enormous amount of intermingling and fusion between them took place. Moreover, when written versions did become available, in most cases they were random accounts, not consciously ‘literary’ works in which the variety of current oral versions was unified and systematised. Added complexity arises from the fact that many such ‘random’ versions were recorded.
Cycle A was developed along truly encyclopedic lines (a development that even around 1000 ce had not yet reached its end). As a story about human self-destructive tendencies, it implied profound questions about ethics, the role and responsibility of the king, the meaning of human life on earth, caught as it was between fate and man’s own will, and about a possible significance of the bloody events in the context of cosmic history.
Such questions were considered on a grand scale, and a vast array of what different religious and intellectual traditions (including, quite prominently, Buddhism) had to contribute to them was laid out. Since the war involved more or less all Aryan clans, our Cycle B could be used to provide the historical background, and inevitably an interaction between the religious material (origin of the world, etc.) took place. Material typical of Cycle C could be incorporated, since it offered a thematic parallel (exile in the forest of the legitimate crown prince and eventual victory of righteousness). Cycle D contributed even more directly, since one of the main protagonists of the Pandavas is Krsna, the prince of Mathura. As described so far, this grand encyclopedic synthesis became crystallised as a definite text in the form of the Mahabharata, arguably the world’s largest epic. A complete translation would run to over three or four thousand pages. But it is the work of many people, over a period of at least 1,500 years, and belonging to different regions. Almost drowned in this enormous mass of text is a small, originally perhaps independent, work, the Bhagavadgita. Ofall the Hindu scriptures, this is probably the single most important one. In it we find one of the earliest formulations of a fully fledged theology, centring around the God-figure Krsna.The Mahabharata also acquired, perhaps around the third century ce, an ‘Appendix’. The primary reason for this addition was the need felt for further information on Krsna. Material typical of our Cycle D could be used for this purpose on a large scale. But it was not presented in isolation: Cycle B laid itself around Krsna’s life as its frame and context. Here again even 1000 ce does not appear to mark the end of the literary developments of the Harivamsa (as this ‘appendix’ was called). The Krsna-figures offered by the Mahabharata and the Harivams'a may be part of a coherent narrative, but in character they are very different from each other.
And when Krsna appears as one of the major God-figures of medieval Hinduism, it is the Krsna of the Harivamsa who provided the primary inspiration for it (with the Bhagavadgita providing its theology).Our Cycle C acquired literary shape in a relatively simpler manner. Moreover, unlike the other texts spoken about so far, the Ramayana, ‘the story of Prince Rama’, was given sophisticated poetic expression, which in turn means by one author (at least for the bulk of the work). The Indian tradition names him as Valmiki. His date may not be too far removed from the change into the Common Era. But this sophisticated epic does not signal the end of Rama’s own history: subsequent individual works demonstrate a process of increasing deification of Rama (more on this aspect in the following section).
This leaves us with one last thematic cycle (our B). The Indian tradition neatly summarises the complex literary developments of this cycle in the concept of the ‘eighteen great Puranas’. If historically the process had been so simple, we would—in the light of the observations made so far—have to speak of eighteen separate recordings of Cycle B material. Yet reality is much more complicated. An ancient core can indeed be identified: views on the origin of the world, its structure and past history, the royal dynasties and the deeds of past heroes and instructions on how to perform rites in honour of ancestors generally. Such a core is still present in many of the extant texts (though by no means in identical verbal form). But then a vast amount of more or less related material was added to such a core, in different regions, by different individuals, at different times. Even after such ‘recordings’ were fixed and could be identified by individual names (for example, ‘Visnu-Purana’), they set in motion a further history of additions (not infrequently by drawing on other such textually ‘fixed’ Puranas). Although there are unlimited possibilities of what could be added to a Purana, and for whatever reason, certainly from our point of view it is the enormous amount of religious material which is of interest. Krsna and Rama figured as heroes already in the dynastic histories typical of our Cycle B. When the ‘eighteen grand Puranas’ crystallised finally as the texts that we have now, every major and minor Hindu god or God-figure had been dealt with in this literature, sometimes on a gigantic scale.
The final products (i.e. the actual text or versions of it that we now possess) belong to different periods. Thus, for example, the Markandeya-Purdna and the Vistw-Purdna, even with their respective interpolations, may well belong to around the middle of the first millennium ce. Others, like the Siva-Purdna or Brahmavaivarta-Purdna, appear to be compiled as late as the middle of the second millennium. But not all this material is ‘anonymous’ and the product of compilers over many centuries. Perhaps the most famous of all these Puranas, the Bhdgavata-Purdna (ninth or early tenth century ce), must in essence be the conscious literary creation of one person (in south India). In turn, the Devi-Bhdgavata-Purdna, which in some lists replaces the Bhdgavata-Purdna, is a conscious imitation, some centuries later, of the former and comes from north-east India.
By now we have almost lost track of the bards who were originally involved in the cultivation of epic literature. Indeed, at some stage interest in purely local, dynastic and genealogical matters ceased, and topics of pan-Indian relevance (such as the origin of the world and the stories associated with the gods) began to dominate epic literature. It seems likely that this transformation went hand in hand with a shift towards brahmin involvement in the epic and puranic enterprise. Indications of this are, for instance, the formulation of the concept of smrti, literally ‘memory’ but denoting in this context ‘tradition’ as opposed to s'ruti, ‘Vedic revelation’. Smrti was put forward as secondary in importance to the Vedas, and as the literature spelling out the implications of the Vedic heritage. The idea of the ‘fifth Veda’ for the Epics brought this literature even closer to brahmin culture. As brahmin-cultivated carriers of the story material about the heroes and the gods, and of popularly expressed philosophical and theological ideas, the Epics and Puranas had an enormous influence on Indian religion.
But it was not just in their Sanskrit form that the Puranas and Epics provided inspiration to much of Indian religion. Innumerable translations, adaptations and very free renderings into the many vernaculars enhanced the accessibility of this material. Yet that is still not the end of the story. In many ways, the classification of the Puranas into ‘eighteen grand ones’ is totally artificial. To a large extent the selection of these (and the lists even of the grand eighteen vary in part) from among a very much larger number of available Puranas has been arbitrary. The remainder, called Upa- or ‘secondary’ Puranas, are not necessarily more recent, more ‘sectarian’ or more regional than many of the ‘classical’ eighteen.
By now we have been discussing a literature that in print would fill many thousands of pages. Yet the Puranas were such a popular genre of religious Eterature, that the list of them ought to be enlarged by thousands of further works. These are now known as the Sthala- or ‘local’ Puranas. Each one is associated with a more or less famous temple or place of pilgrimage and narrates, amongst other things, the deeds of the relevant god in that particular locality. When discussing the temple, more will have to be said about this literature.
The Hindus are not the only participants in this enormous literary enterprise. There are some indications that the Indian Buddhists also showed interest in the genre of the Puranas (the Mahdvastu could be classified like this); but the Jains developed their versions of the Epics and Puranas into a whole literature of grandiose proportions. More will be said about this in a later section under the heading of the Jain Mahdpurdna.
In summary then it must be stated that an exploration of the Epics and Puranas does not allow for easy short cuts. These are not just twenty or so texts of minor religious significance, but actually imply a whole literary history of enormous textual proportions. These works were of such popular and widespread influence that even today in many a South Asian country the stories of Rama, Krsna and the Pandavas constitute some of the most famous themes of various art forms. Although the old Hinduism in many of these countries has been superseded by Islam or Theravada Buddhism, epic and puranic heroes still figure not just in the various literatures, but also in dances and in the puppet theatre.