Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives

INTRODUCTION

India’s history is a curiously unpeopled place. As usually told, it has dynasties, epochs, religions, and castes—but not many individuals. Beyond a few iconic names, most of the important historical figures recede into a haze, both for people outside India and for many Indians themselves. This book is an experiment in dispelling some of the fog by telling India’s story through fifty remarkable lives.

The essays in the book move headlong across twenty-five hundred years of history, from the political and moral preoccupations of India’s earliest historical personality, the Buddha, to the late-twentieth-century capitalist imagination of the industrialist Dhirubhai Ambani. On the way, we meet kings, religious thinkers, freedom fighters, poets, painters, mathematicians, and radical social reformers.

Jawaharlal Nehru famously described this past as a palimpsest, where each successively dominant culture, religion, or group left its traces, never quite effacing what came before it. It is a beautiful image, evocative of the country’s deep civilizational stratigraphy, but I’ve come to think of it as too passive. To me, India’s past is an arena of ferocious contest, its dead heroes continually springing back to life and dispatched to the front lines of equally ferocious contemporary cultural and political battles. So this book is also concerned with the afterlives of historical figures: the often intriguing ways in which they are put to later use by government officials, entrepreneurs, and tribal leaders across the Indian interior, or in physics labs and health clinics, on hip-hop tracks and in yoga studios, across the East and West.

The subcontinent on which these stories unfold is the only place where each of the world’s four great religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam) has at different times ruled large areas. Through religious collisions and philosophical and ethical explorations, many of the individuals in this book were part of intense arguments that have been kept going for millennia: about what kind of life is worth living, what kind of society is worth having, which hierarchies are morally legitimate, what role religion has in the political and legal order, and what kind of place India should be.

Such arguments have kept India in a permanent (and, on balance, productive) state of openness about what the country and its people are. A civilization able to produce a Mahavira, a Mirabai, a Malik Ambar, a Periyar, a Muhammad Iqbal, and a Mohandas Gandhi is a place open to radical experiments with self-definition. It is particularly worth recalling that history and creative energy at a moment when some in India seek to transform the ferment of ideas over what India is and should be into a singular religious concoction.

Of course, much about Indian history still remains unknown and disputed, especially for the period before 1000 CE. About the lives of Indian women, apart from a few queens, the records are distressingly sparse right through to the twentieth century. Even now, much of India’s history is endangered: some of who we were and what we’ve done sits in uncatalogued heaps, often in languages few still know. Still, in the past few decades, we’ve made significant advances in our ability to make sense of the Indian past, through developments in archaeology, philosophy, mathematics, art history, and literature. I draw on this important work as I try to track the fifty figures in this book: to see how they navigated the intellectual confluences and the practical constraints of their times, and made choices that changed, in small and large and sometimes unintended ways, the circumstances of the figures who succeeded them.

Many of the essays in the book are driven by arguments, ranging from the nature of power to how to live a healthy life to the conditions of individual liberty. Here’s one argument to start with: that India’s nonfictional past is sufficiently complex, unexpected, and rich in inspiring example that fictionalized heroes are a little redundant. By insisting that figures from India’s past be preserved in memory as saints, above human consideration, we deny them not just their real natures, but also their genuine achievements.

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If you don’t yet know the arresting stories behind some of the names I’ve mentioned (say, Malik Ambar, a gifted seventeenth-century Abyssinian slave turned Deccan warrior king; or others you’ll encounter in this book, such as Chidambaram Pillai, a dogged Tamil nationalist who took on the steamship might of the British Empire), that is perhaps not accidental. Who gets remembered, how history is told, and who gets to tell it are all matters of political dispute in India. Some historical icons are so staunchly defended against scrutiny that libraries whose collections have enabled scholars to write about those icons have been attacked. Books thought insufficiently reverent toward cherished figures are pulped and banned, their authors threatened, silenced, or worse.

As I chased down often-elusive lives in far-flung communities and at archaeological sites, in archives and in texts, I sometimes found an absurd gap between the superhero guises that some figures are forced to don today and the searching, self-critical natures that animated them in their own lifetimes. The impulse to make Indian historical lives exemplary and didactic goes back a long way—right to the Buddha, at least. It’s an ahistorical habit of mind mirrored by those who exalt India’s culture as ineffable and spiritual—something that turns out to go back quite a long way, too.

British imperialists liked to suggest that Indians were indifferent to their history (and inept at independent thinking to boot) because of their attachment to doll-like gods and caste rituals. Indians saw things differently, of course: the colonizers had pillaged the subcontinent’s historical resources with the same voraciousness with which they had plundered the teakwood and tea, unmooring their subjects from their traditions and pasts. Beginning in Bengal after the turn of the twentieth century, successive generations of nationalists struggled to gain control of their own history. And after Independence was won, in 1947, a host of long-suppressed claimants (regions, castes, religious communities) pushed for the primacy of their own favorite leaders within a new Indian pantheon. One of the most predictable acts of newly elected state or national governments was, and is, to rewrite history textbooks to their liking. The country’s current ruling ideology aspires to define India as a Hindu nation, and to endow it with appropriately Hindu antecedents, with the inevitable simplifications that involves.

Despite such a tricky political climate, or maybe because of it, this seemed a crucial moment to explore the Indian past, in search of a little more complexity and nuance. It is often said of India that, given all its tensions, it’s a miracle it holds together. To me, that’s partly explicable, and some answers can be found in the intellectual and cultural capital embodied by the lives I’ve chosen for this book.

One striking feature of India’s history (and one running theme of this book) is how many imaginative struggles have been waged against what remains a profoundly rigid society. Sometimes—as with the sixteenth-century ruler Krishnadevaraya, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the painter Amrita Sher-Gil—the battle against conformity has been inward and psychological. Sometimes it has been outward, against the social order, frequently assuming the form of an assault on the hierarchies of caste. From the Buddha and Mahavira onward to Phule, Periyar, and Ambedkar, we see some of India’s most original minds engaging with this system of social oppression, which has elicited condemnation for almost as long as it has existed, yet has time and again been able to absorb, and even gain a degree of immunity from, such critiques.

While I was working on this book, some other figures whose stories I’d grown up with became more affecting to me than the legends. Crouched alongside pit looms in a neighborhood of Muslim weavers, I better understood the urge of the fifteenth-century poet Kabir to break free and smite the houses of the powerful. Listening to Indian policy makers, I grasped anew the devilish utility of Kautilya, the mysterious political thinker from around the turn of the Common Era, whose ideas about rulership might have offered Stalin a lesson or two. I sensed more clearly the Brahminic rage at Ashoka’s Buddhist-inspired message when, at Sannati, near the excavated Buddhist site of Kanaganahalli, I came across a stone tablet inscribed with his edicts. It had for centuries been turned facedown, its center smashed out and the stone appropriated as an altar in a Hindu temple. I gained fresh appreciation for the military intelligence of the seventeenth-century ruler Shivaji when surveying from one of his forts the arduous landscape he had conquered, and fresh respect, too, for how the twentieth-century diplomat Krishna Menon changed India’s standing in the world despite personal anguish laid bare in intelligence files and private letters. And I encountered the uncanny modern cadences in the poetry of Basava, a twelfth-century social visionary.

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Occasionally, as I traveled around for this project, I overheard kids cheerfully explaining to their friends what I was up to: He’s telling the story of how India became number one. Indeed, it’s a habit of national histories to justify the present as the perfect and necessary outcome of what came before. Yet as I pursued the stories that make up this book, my own thinking sometimes veered in the opposite direction: I was moved by how many of these lives pose challenges to the Indian present and remind us of future possibilities that are at risk of being closed off.

Meanwhile, though, new possibilities have undeniably opened up. As recently as a few decades ago, what happened in India was often considered peripheral to what used to be called the first world. Those of us who wrote about the country had to make arguments for its relevance to, for instance, the larger story of democracy. Then, as India’s presence in the global economy, and its culture and politics, became more visible, much of the writing about it was driven by perplexity: Where was India going? What did it want?

Today, India, in both its positive and negative aspects, is far less peripheral to discussions about the world at large. Given that, I hope the ideas and arguments embodied by the fifty people featured in this book help complicate not just the stories Indians like to tell themselves, but also those the world tells about us—and about itself. India’s most compelling minds have often been forced to exist in splendid isolation; I’d like to see them restored to their rightful place in the world: as figures engaged with other individuals and ideas across time and borders. In this way, I think readers might better grasp that many concepts the West sees as unique to itself actually have parallels, resonances, and counterarguments in other parts of the globe.

Attempting to tell in fifty lives the history of any nation, let alone one as vast and various as India, is an exercise designed to provoke. But the impossibility of being representative, or all-inclusive, has also given me freedom. I’ve chosen to leave out some familiar names, to allow space to bring in a few others who should be more widely known, a choice with which I think one of the figures I have excluded, Nehru, would have agreed.

In this happily partial exercise, one of my criteria for inclusion was the light that old lives might shed on urgent issues of the present. So, nearly all the lives in this book illuminate, in some way or another, pressing contemporary questions: about the position of women in society, about the nature of love and sexual choice, about cults of personal political power, about claims to water and land, about racial prejudice, about economic inequality, and even about the mechanics of the universe. Yet I also hope that readers will argue strenuously about the fifty names I’ve chosen—to dispute those who have been left out and to make alternative selections.

For that’s how I see Incarnations in the end: as an open invitation to a different kind of conversation about India’s past, and its future. Among my hopes is that, after finishing the last of these fifty portraits, a reader might share at least some of what I’ve come to feel strongly: that India’s capacity to change itself, and to challenge its own dogmas (and sometimes those of the wider world), is not just a historical relic. It’s a still-available capacity, one more necessary than ever.

1

THE BUDDHA

Waking India Up

Fifth century BCE

The sun has slipped behind the tarpaulin roofs of a Mumbai slum. Day laborers are streaming home from ten-hour shifts working on construction sites or tending the gardens of nearby private schools. In this particular web of slum lanes, many workers are Dalit, the untouchables of old—a status so low they were not even part of the caste order. Most months, their financial situation boils down to what people around here call earn and eat. But for two years, some of these families set aside what little they could for bricks and mortar, and now they have a deep-blue room, five meters a side, that stands distinct from all the other hand-built homes in the slum.

A temple devoted to the Buddha—many slums in urban India have one. This particular place of worship is tucked behind a scrap shop. In the West, the Buddha is often seen as an extinguisher of his own personality, the original Impersonal Man. Indeed, after attaining his enlightenment, it is said that he referred to himself as tathagata, gone. In modern India, though, his legacy has helped hundreds of millions of low-caste citizens become newly present, allowing them to emerge from the Hindu caste system’s iron cage. He is far more surprising, it turns out, than the conventional image—or the one of a placid sage sitting in the lotus position, half smiling—lets on. Although many aspects of the Buddha’s life remain elusive, he is perhaps the first individual personality we can recognize in the subcontinent’s history.

Fifteen-year-old Vijay watched his father lay bricks for the little blue temple. Buddha had no caste, so I have no caste, he says. It’s better this way. His older brother Siddhartha chimes in: "Buddha was for equality."

Siddhartha is one of a dozen boys in the slum who were named after the Buddha, a man born Siddhartha Gautama near the foothills of Nepal’s southern border with India, probably in the fifth century BCE. In his lifetime, the Buddha created a spiritual philosophy that has rightly been called one of the turning points in the history of civilization. Less known, but perhaps equally important, were his rational challenges to reigning beliefs about caste and religious authority. Some scholars see him as a social subversive, some as a wry critic of self-important merchants, priests, and kings. To others, he was primarily a philosophical, and even political, experimentalist, one who explored new ways of organizing and conducting human life.

The religion that began with his experiments eventually spread throughout Asia, from the western edges of Afghanistan to Japan, gradually becoming what it is now: the fourth largest in the world. But in India it flourished for a millennium, and then all but disappeared, for reasons that are still mysterious. Only in the mid-twentieth century, as British colonial rule gave way to an independent India, was the Indian Buddha revived in the place of his birth, dusted off and reclaimed for his political utility as much as for his ethics. To several of the fathers of the modern nation, the Buddha provided a rational faith that could be weaponized against the hierarchies that still warp Indian society. Today, the Buddha continues to inspire people such as Siddhartha and Vijay in their struggles to assert their own individualities.

*   *   *

Evidence for civilization on the Indian subcontinent dates back to at least 2500 BCE, when city settlements began to develop in the Indus Valley, in today’s Pakistan. From these sites, archaeologists have excavated many objects, but the script of this civilization remains unintelligible to us—if it is a script at all. The composition of the earliest Vedas, the oldest sources of Hindu thought, seems to have begun roughly a millennium later. Beyond these hymns to the gods, though, we have no physical evidence of this world; and neither from the Indus Valley sites nor in the Vedas can we feel the pulse of any historical individuals. It’s only a thousand or more years after the Vedas were composed, with the arrival of the Buddha, that real personalities appear to us on the stage of Indian history.

Even before it began to be written down, the story of the Buddha was given permanence in painting and sculpture. In the oldest of the caves at Ajanta, in western India, are probably the earliest-surviving representations of the Buddha’s life: vivid frescoes, some of which date back to the first century BCE. There, in front of you, are the oldest Indian faces in existence, the writer and historian William Dalrymple says. They inhabited a world incredibly different from ours. Yet you can look into the eyes of these people, of individuals, and their emotions are immediately recognizable.

Although scholars still debate the Buddha’s exact dates, with an elastic range for his death that stretches from roughly 500 to 400 BCE, it’s clear he lived in an era of remarkable invention worldwide. Within the space of a couple of centuries, Confucius articulated his social philosophy in China, written versions of the Old Testament crystallized in Palestine, and Socrates conducted the dialogues that would lay many of the foundations of Western philosophy. On the Gangetic Plains of northern India, iron tools, writing, and coinage were producing and circulating new wealth. Trade contacts with Persia and western Asia were creating cosmopolitan cities, bustling with commerce and competing ideas about how to live a good life. Many of the forms of Hinduism familiar to Indians today, as well as many conflicting worldviews, also took shape in this period.

The Buddha’s life played out in the midst of this flux. He grew up within sight of the high mountains of Nepal, on the northern edges of the Magadha region. Social life was largely regulated by the rituals contained in the Vedas. These practices, and the sacred verses describing them, were in turn fiercely controlled by the priestly castes that constituted the highest varna, or estate, of men, the Brahmins.

But across Magadha, communities were beginning to reject both Brahminic power and Vedic rituals, such as animal sacrifice. Some of these communities were chiefdoms dominated by men from the warrior and trading varnas. The Buddha himself was a member of the second-highest varna, the Kshatriyas, made up of warrior castes. He was a product of his own time, the Harvard scholar Charles Hallisey says, but he was also an innovator, someone who creates something new in the world—and this tension is right at the centre of everything we think about who the Buddha was historically.

There are almost as many versions of how the Buddha developed his radical moral vision as there are Buddhist traditions around the world today. Perhaps the most well known, depicted on the walls of the Ajanta caves, is an inward drama: the story of one man’s religious, psychological, and ethical experimentation. After a cosseted upbringing, Siddhartha Gautama was deeply shaken by his first encounters with human suffering. (Let’s set aside how sheltered he must have been, to have grown up not encountering suffering.) Undone by his belated exposure to worldly pain, he resolved to escape it. Renouncing his wealthy family, he took up the life of a wandering ascetic. My body became extremely lean, he later said. When I thought I would touch the skin of my stomach, I actually took hold of my spine.

Over the course of six years, Siddhartha explored a number of the spiritual practices and philosophies swirling around northern India, but his attempts to find a release from suffering proved fruitless. Then, after abandoning these efforts, he was jolted, Proust-like, by a childhood memory of how, as his father worked nearby, Siddhartha sat under the shade of a rose apple tree in a state of pure joy, without sensual desires, without evil ideas. How could he recover that state? Days passed in mental struggle, and then one spring night, while sitting under a bodhi tree, he achieved it. And in that state, he believed he had grasped the causes of suffering, and its cure. He had now awakened, emerging from our worldly life of attachments, desires, and pain as if from an interminable dream.

*   *   *

Around five hundred kilometers south of Ajanta, in the rice paddy and cotton fields of northern Karnataka, is another major Buddhist site, Kanaganahalli, where the remains of a large domed reliquary shrine, or stupa, dating from roughly the first century BCE, were uncovered just twenty years ago. In the centuries after the Buddha’s life, many ordinary, nonliterate Indians would have learned of him through Jatakas, popular morality tales about his imagined previous lives, which were often depicted on sculptural friezes that decorated stupas such as the one at Kanaganahalli. There is something particularly captivating about these sculptures, perhaps because the soft gray limestone gave the carvers a freer hand to imbue the friezes with a sense of liveliness and humor. But we also see the Buddha represented here just by symbols: an empty seat that expresses the extinction of his self, the bodhi tree where he reached enlightenment, and the cakka, or cakra, the great wheel, which has come to represent his teaching.

After waking into his new state of consciousness, the Buddha decided to share his liberating insights. He began to advocate a path he called the middle way, which avoided both asceticism and worldly indulgence. His teachings became the dhamma, which roughly means law; it was a set of principles to be followed, but also a teaching about the principle, or essence, of suffering and experience. The term was originally a Brahmin one, the Sanskrit dharma, which prescribed a different law for each caste—laws that encompassed every dimension of life, from marriage to work to meals. The Buddha took this established term and bent it to his own purpose; his dhamma was a single ethical vision embracing all living beings. Identify oneself with all, he taught—that is, regard every creature in the universe with compassion.

The Buddha’s solution to suffering lay in the individual mind. Yet he was also sketching a new form of society. His relative egalitarianism is clear even from the language he used to teach his followers. Brahmins fiercely protected the Sanskrit in which the Vedas were expressed, and the lower orders were forbidden from learning this language of the gods. Instead of Sanskrit, the Buddha used the local dialect of the people. He also dispensed with the idea of a deity, and with a priestly caste meant to direct social life according to scripture. As his following grew, he founded an order of monks, the sangha, which adopted broadly collectivist principles, taking important decisions through discussion in council and sharing much of what little property they were permitted to have. Low-caste members were allowed the same religious education that was open to other followers, another practice barred within Brahminic society. After some resistance—it seems the Buddha was not entirely immune from patriarchal attitudes—he allowed women to be admitted to the order as nuns. He also rejected doctrines of predestination, by which birth supposedly determined people’s roles in society. He was a moral meritocrat, and to an extent a social one, too.

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Following the Buddha’s death, his teachings spread first by word of mouth and then by imperial enthusiasm. In the third century BCE, India’s greatest empire-builder, Ashoka (5), embraced the Buddha’s teachings and accelerated their transmission throughout India, inscribing on pillars and rock faces across the subcontinent messages inspired by them. Judging from the archaeological evidence alone, India for much of the next thousand years seems to have been at least as much Buddhist as it was Hindu.

By the seventh century CE, things had visibly changed. Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim visiting the way stations of the Buddha’s life in northern India, found a dwindling community of monks and roughly a thousand monasteries deserted and in ruins. They are filled with wild shrubs, and solitary to the last degree. How did this come to pass? In short, we don’t know. As Xuanzang traveled, he recorded stories of attacks on Buddhist holy sites, including the toppling of the original bodhi tree where the Buddha had found enlightenment. Later Tibetan and other Buddhist chronicles also mention Hindu hostilities against the faith. What’s clearer, historically, is that Buddhism eventually came under assault from Muslim marauders—for instance, in the devastating twelfth-century sack of Nalanda, a great center of Buddhist learning, which forever destroyed a major storehouse of human knowledge.

But it’s possible that Hinduism also adapted over the centuries in ways that allowed it to win back followers. Around the start of the Common Era, there were efforts to formalize the great Hindu epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and legal treatises such as the Manusmriti, or the Laws of Manu. Some scholars see in these works attempts to incorporate Buddhist ideas in order to neutralize and rebut Buddhism—effecting a kind of Brahminic counterreformation. After all, Hinduism has never been a fixed doctrine moored to a single sacred text: it remained multiple and in some respects labile, a fact that allowed it to absorb criticism and challenges.

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Once, in Japan, I traveled to the ancient capital of Nara to see its Buddhist temples and shrines. Built of massive timber beams, they’ve been protected, even burnished, by the wrap of Japanese civilization. So I was startled to come across images and statues bearing names I knew: Indian names for some of the Buddha’s many incarnations. Discovering them in shrines used continuously for around twelve centuries, I was moved anew by the difficulty of the Buddha’s course through the history of the land where he was born. The Sanskrit roots of the word Buddha mean someone who has woken up. In India, Buddhism seemed to sleep for centuries. It was only the anguished choice of one of modern India’s founding figures that summoned the Buddha back to life.

On October 14, 1956, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (41), the leader of a political movement to gain rights and dignity for the country’s Dalits, stood on a stage in the city of Nagpur and formally converted to Buddhism. Before him, in the crowd, were some four hundred thousand or more of his followers. Though Ambedkar had been an architect of the new Indian Constitution, he doubted that lower-caste citizens would be able to thrive in what remained, despite his active struggle, a caste-dominated polity. After taking his own oaths, he turned to administer a set of conversion vows to the individuals in the massive crowd:

I renounce the Hindu religion which has obstructed the evolution of my former humanity and considered humans unequal and inferior … I regard all human beings as equals … From this time forward I vow that I will behave according to the Buddha’s teachings.

Ambedkar was chiseling his own Buddha: near enough a social revolutionary, or an ancient Indian Rousseau. Like other founders of modern India, he was recycling historical figures who could be endowed with new life in order to solve the problems of Indian society—a little like the scrap shop workers just behind the Mumbai slum temple, sifting through their bags for something of continuing value.

2

MAHAVIRA

Soldier of Nonviolence

Fifth century BCE

Mohandas Gandhi (38), the Mahatma, was fond of the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One blind man, grabbing the elephant’s tail, said that an elephant was like a rope. Another, holding its trunk, countered that it was like a snake. A third, touching one of its legs, protested that it was really like a tree. Those touching its ears or sides made still other claims. All were right from their respective points of view, Gandhi wrote in the mid-1920s, and wrong from the point of view of one another, and right and wrong from the point of view of the man who knew the elephant.

For Gandhi, the parable illustrated the doctrine of the many-sidedness of reality. It is this doctrine that has taught me to judge a Mussalman from his own standpoint and a Christian from his, he continued. "I used to resent the ignorance of my opponents. Today I can love them because I am gifted with the eye to see myself as others see me and vice versa … My anekantavada is the result of the twin doctrine of Satya and Ahimsa."

Anekantavada, satya, and ahimsa: many-sidedness, truth, and nonviolence. These principles were particularly urgent for Gandhi in the 1920s, as relations between Hindus and Muslims slid into rioting and bloodshed. Though Gandhi would give these virtues his own characteristic twist, they were rooted deep in Indian thought, in a critique of Vedic Hinduism that coalesced in the Gangetic river basin some twenty-five hundred years ago. That critique eventually became Jainism, one of the four great religions born in India (along with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism). The man who systematized the Jain worldview, in the fifth century BCE, is known by the honorific Mahavira, which means the great hero. Ahimsa, rigorous attachment to the truth, and the doctrine of anekantavada were central to Mahavira’s teaching, and he would later be canonized by Gandhi (along with the Buddha and Tolstoy) as a soldier of nonviolence.

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Mahavira, according to Jain tradition, was the last in a line of twenty-four superhuman figures known as tirthankaras, or ford makers: beings who had crossed over from the mundane world of human suffering and violence and into the realm of spiritual liberation, and could help others do the same. In our human history, he was the descendant of a Kshatriya martial clan—like the Buddha (1), his contemporary in fifth-century Magadha. Also like the Buddha, he became one of the most compelling of a range of early Indian religious philosophers generally referred to as Shramanas, or seekers—renouncers who turned their backs on domestic life and explored various paths to individual spiritual liberation, while rejecting the priestly role of the Brahmin caste.

Mahavira’s teachings shared many important features with the Buddha’s; in particular, they both opposed beliefs at the core of the Vedas, the earliest Hindu texts, about the role of caste in spiritual life, the supremacy of the gods, and the indispensable nobility of ritual sacrifice. These sacrifices often required animal slaughter and supposedly generated a potent creative force that sustained both individual life and the cosmos.

The rejection of sacrificial rituals was especially significant for Mahavira and his followers. "All forms of existence, according to Jainism, are embodied souls—the Jain term is jiva, which means life force, explains Paul Dundas, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and a scholar of Jainism. For Jains, this life force is manifest not just in humans, animals, and plants; it is also present as unseen souls moving through earth, air, fire, and water. So we are surrounded by life, and the correct stance towards this is to govern oneself, Dundas says, to discipline one’s behavior so that we can minimize the destruction of life, whether witting or unwitting."

*   *   *

This, in essence, is the Jain doctrine of ahimsa, a direct inversion of Vedic beliefs about the sustaining powers of animal sacrifice. Mahavira’s teachings required not only that one abstain from violent acts (except in extraordinary circumstances), but also, more important, that one adopt a fundamental stance of benign intention toward the world. Some have tried to connect this stance directly to anekantavada, as Gandhi did, claiming that the spirit of nonviolence informed an attitude of intellectual humility and religious tolerance that is manifest in the works of several important early Jain thinkers.

You can see the Jain attitude toward living creatures at a two-story hospital on the premises of the seventeenth-century Digambar Jain temple in Delhi’s old city. The hospital is not for humans, but for birds. In its four hundred cages, cooled by ceiling fans, fluttering convalescents are fed compound medicine and liquid protein and then released into the air, or into the arms of little boys, who race home with their healed roosters.

Strict Jain vegetarianism prohibits the eating not just of animals or eggs, but also of root vegetables, in part because pulling them from the ground disturbs the lives of other plants and little creatures. Today, in the Chowpatty area of South Mumbai, which is home to many Jain laypeople, these dietary guidelines are adhered to even in the popular new Starbucks.

The stereotypical image of the Jain renunciant is a monk (or possibly nun) dutifully sweeping the ground gently before him with a small broom, so that he doesn’t tread on any living creatures, with his mouth covered to prevent the accidental swallowing of any small bugs. Yet Mahavira took his inversion of Vedic Hinduism one step further, transforming the tapas, or heat, of the Brahminic sacrificial fire into the tapas, or austerity, of a severe personal discipline. For the Jains, salvation might indeed be the sum of sacrifices: not of living beings, but of one’s self.

*   *   *

Most of what we know about the life of Mahavira derives from two Jain hagiographies: the proselytizing Kalpa Sutra, written centuries after Mahavira, and the earlier Acharanga Sutra, which supposedly contains his own words. (There are also tantalizing references to Mahavira in some relatively early Buddhist texts.) Mahavira was born Vardhaman, the son of a clan leader, in Kundagrama, a kingdom in today’s Bihar—though his exact place of birth remains a subject of contentious village rivalries in the state’s pilgrim tourist trade. In the Kalpa Sutra, his anti-Brahminism predates even his birth: in the nick of time, Mahavira’s embryo was transplanted from the womb of a Brahmin woman into a woman from the Kshatriya caste. He was also apparently a very early adopter of nonviolence: the Kalpa Sutra reports that he kept calm and still in his mother’s womb, so as not to discomfort her, though he quivered from time to time to reassure her he was alive.

The Acharanga Sutra paints a strikingly austere picture of Mahavira’s life. Much in his story echoes the biography we have inherited for the Buddha, though with differences that seem calibrated to depict Mahavira as the more benign, rigorous, and therefore righteous of the two. Brahminic male ideals of maintaining a household were not for Mahavira. In some Jain accounts, he was married with a child before he left to become a celibate; in others, he was celibate for life. But the traditions agree that he abandoned a comfortable (and probably aristocratic) home to wander naked and alone through the wilderness. In at least one version of the Mahavira story, his renunciation was more sensitively plotted than that of the Buddha, who supposedly fled in the middle of the night, abandoning his wife and son. Mahavira is said to have waited, better mannered, until after his elderly parents died, so as not to upset them.

Mahavira’s path toward enlightenment began with a famously violent, flamboyant act. For him (and subsequently for his disciples), it was not enough to shave his head as the Buddhists did. After fasting two and a half days without drinking water, the Kalpa Sutra says, Mahavira put on a divine robe, and, quite alone, nobody else being present, he tore out his hair … and entered the state of houselessness.

He was thirty years old, roughly the same age as the Buddha was at his renunciation; but his period of mendicant wandering lasted twelve years, twice as long as the Buddha’s phase of spiritual experimentation. During these years, Mahavira engaged in deep reflective meditation and harsh physical penances, eating next to nothing and suffering the violent contempt of those who couldn’t fathom his actions. He finally found enlightenment at the age of forty-two, in a characteristically self-punishing way. The Buddha is always depicted as sitting underneath the Tree of Enlightenment, Dundas says. In contrast, a very old description of Mahavira’s enlightenment has him sitting near this tree, but under the heat of a blazing sun, squatting on his heels in a rather uncomfortable position, and maintaining this position for two and a half days until he attained enlightenment.

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If Mahavira’s austerity represented a direct challenge to Brahminism, and stood as a reproach to the softer middle path of the Buddha, it was nevertheless a clear extension of the martial mores of Mahavira’s warrior caste—though directed to a very different end. As Dundas puts it, The notion of vigour, of heroism, very much informs the Jain ascetic ideal. I think in a modern world, many of us view asceticism in rather more negative terms. But fasting, forms of physical torture or pain which certain types of religious people have always inflicted on themselves—in India this was regarded in a highly positive way, as almost a form of warrior activity. As it would later be for Gandhi (38), the endurance of physical and psychological hardship was seen as necessary to becoming a nonviolent actor.

This conquering spirit extended itself into the intellectual realm. The disputes reflected in the biographies of the Buddha and Mahavira were set within a broader context of intellectual competition between rival philosophers and teachers. Alongside the Kalpa and Acharanga Sutras, one of the earliest Jain texts contains the doctrines of sects with whom the Jains actively disagreed. These may have included materialists, who denied the existence of a spiritual realm and therefore the possibility of salvation, and fatalists, who denied that human beings could exert any influence whatsoever on their paths to spiritual liberation.

Mahavira and subsequent Jains attacked these views, basing their own claims to preeminence on the rigorous requirements of Jain religious practice, and on their analysis of reality. These, in turn, were supposedly the fruits of revelation. According to Jainism, Mahavira’s enlightenment, and the enlightenments of the other ford makers, constituted a state of omniscience. We might say that he became like the man who knew the elephant for what it was, and could help transmit that knowledge to his followers.

Yet such a thoroughgoing philosophical victory contained a paradox within it. The Jain analysis of reality was founded largely on anekantavada, the doctrine of many-sidedness, with its inherent critique of the limitations of human understanding. On what basis, then, could Mahavira and his philosophy claim to speak from a position of omniscience? This was also a problem for later commentators who wished to link anekantavada directly to ahimsa. While the early Jains may have been socially tolerant, they maintained a faith in their own intellectual and religious certitude. Ultimately, anekantavada was not a doctrine of relativism: the blind men were, in the end, arguing over the same elephant. As Dundas has written, Jainism’s consistent historical stance with regard to itself is that … it is at the most profound level different from and superior to other paths.

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Today, we can see Mahavira’s brand of extreme asceticism and spiritual confidence embodied in the beautiful sculptural forms of the Jain tradition, which represent the ford makers and other mythical Jains. With spare, powerful physiques and lustrous skin—a luster, it is said, that comes with the renunciation of many foods—these sculptures stand in an ethereal nakedness, which was once described by the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer as a strange but perfect aloofness, a nudity of chilling majesty. So still are they in their rejection of earthly life that they often have climbing vines carved around their thighs.

The most remarkable of these monoliths is the statue of Bahubali, or Gommata, who, according to one Jain sect, was the first person other than a ford maker to achieve liberation. Erected at the end of the tenth century, in a period when Buddhism and Buddhist sites in India seem to have been under attack, it still looms above the plains of southern Karnataka. At seventeen meters high and eight meters wide, it’s one of the biggest statues of the human form anywhere in the world.

Despite Jainism’s intellectual aggression, and its hostility to the power of the Brahmin caste, over the course of its history the religion seems to have engendered little retaliatory violence. Perhaps ahimsa made the Jains seem innocuous, or perhaps the Jains themselves recognized that a religion whose monastic and lay members were drawn largely from the middle and lower castes could not afford to antagonize its neighbors and trading partners. At the same time, the austerity that protected the religion may also have limited its appeal, and prevented it from spreading, as Buddhism did, outside India. Remaining small in scale, perhaps it was never seen as a threat.

The faith also saw internal schisms. One issue that continues to divide the Jain community is whether women, too, can advance on the path to enlightenment. The strictest of the leading Jain traditions contends that women can’t be ordained ascetics, since their bodies produce eggs that are killed during menstruation. In addition, it argues that only those who abandon all possessions, clothes included, and live sky clad—the lovely Jain phrase for nakedness—can wander toward grace.

It was difficult in Mahavira’s time to be a hard-core Jain practitioner, and it is difficult in modern India, too. Attributed to him are five uncompromising ethical rules that continue to guide Jains in their struggle toward salvation: the renunciation of killing, of speaking untruths, of sexual pleasure, of greed, and of all attachments to living beings and nonliving things. Of course, not all five million or so current followers of Jainism can strictly adhere to these principles. There is a large lay community, especially among the trading castes, that, while observing strict vegetarianism, continues to do business, procreate, and support the small number of Jain monks and, in some sects, nuns.

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So why did Gandhi, as he advocated his views on religious tolerance and nonviolence amid the turmoil of pre-Independence India, reach for this ancient, renunciatory tradition? It has been argued that his understanding of nonviolence was shaped more by the example of Christ, and specifically by Tolstoy’s ideas, than by Jainism. Yet perhaps the political message of Gandhi’s nonviolence, which extended beyond the Jain conception, at the same time demanded a specifically Indian expression. Gandhi was not only pursuing religious amity; he was fighting for freedom from the British, for a sovereign India for Indians. And, for him, Indian self-rule had to begin with rule over the self, something he believed his soldiers of nonviolence had achieved. Only they saw deeper and truer in their profession, and found the secret of a true, happy, honorable and godly life, Gandhi wrote of them. Let us be joint sharers with these teachers and this land of ours will once more be the abode of gods.

3

PANINI

Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint

Fourth century BCE

At the end of the last century, Bangalore became synonymous with Indian software. In this century, it’s not entirely outlandish to think that Indians may become synonymous with American start-ups. Already, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, around 40 percent of start-ups in California’s Silicon Valley are run by people from Indian backgrounds.

One reason for this predominance is that Indians have the highest incomes of any group of American immigrants, and can secure elite, high-tech U.S. educations. Similarly rigorous educations can be acquired in India, at places such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, modeled on MIT and established by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet perhaps there is another, subtler reason for the rise of Indians in IT, one that takes us back twenty-five hundred years, to the original nerd.

His name was Panini, and he created, in what amounts to a mere forty pages, the most complete linguistic system in history. This masterwork, known as the Ashtadhyayi, or Eight Chapters, helped to make Sanskrit the lingua franca of the Asian world for more than a thousand years. It’s one of the most astonishing intellectual achievements of the human mind, and a very beautiful system, Paul Kiparsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, says. It’s intensely pleasurable to explore—and one reason to be pre-occupied with it is that there’s so much more to find out.

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Panini was born into the Brahmin varna, the highest of the Hindu orders, and the only one whose members were permitted to use the Sanskrit language. It’s believed he lived around the fourth century BCE, in the subcontinent’s northwest, in a town called Salatura, near today’s Peshawar, close to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The outlines of Panini’s life are misty, but the imprint of his mind on the Ashtadhyayi is unmistakable. It’s quite clearly the work of a single individual, an ancient obsessive fascinated with deconstructing things in order to understand how they work.

What Panini took apart and held up to the light of his mind was Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas. Transmitted by memorized recitation, the sounds and rhythms of these sacred hymns and incantations, and the language itself, were believed to reflect eternal truths about the universe. To analyze and understand this language, the task of Brahminic scholars, or pandits, such as Panini, was nothing less than to grasp the nature of the cosmos. Precisely understanding human action, which includes language, is a source of religious merit, Kiparsky explains. Just as in yoga, the idea is that we breathe mindful of the breath itself, and that is a way toward salvation—so, if we speak mindful of the structure of the system underlying speech, that also brings us closer to salvation.

Sanskrit means perfectly made. It is a language of extraordinary precision. In English, for example, the role that nouns play in a sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, and so forth) can usually be gleaned only from the context. But Sanskrit uses eight different suffixes to embed these meanings into the form of the words themselves. You can tell from a single Sanskrit noun, even in isolation, its syntactical function: that is, whether it is the possessor of some object or quality, the instrument with which some action was performed, the location where a process unfolded, and more. Other features of the language can be equally expressive of such subtleties.

Panini set out to capture in exacting detail how this sacred language worked. To do this, he needed what linguists call a metalanguage—a way of talking about the features and structure of Sanskrit that wasn’t entirely present in Sanskrit itself. When you encounter terms like noun and indirect object in English, you’re encountering bits of a metalanguage invented so we can better discuss the language. Panini’s metalanguage, however, had to be concise enough to be committed to memory and passed on orally. Describing Sanskrit in ordinary terms would have been unwieldy, so he developed a shorthand or code that he used to express its grammatical structure and other features.

To create his coded metalanguage, Panini borrowed the building blocks of Sanskrit. He split the spiritually charged language into its constituent sounds, and assigned to each a coded linguistic meaning. In Panini’s system, various features of Sanskrit (noun cases, classes of sounds, and so on) are represented by abbreviations, often single syllables or letters. Panini then combined these abbreviations into verselike strings, or sutras, which set out the rules of Sanskrit in a highly compressed form. Take this sutra, for example, which consists entirely of code words: iko yaṇ aci. Decoded and translated into English, it means "i, u, ṛ, and ḷ are replaced by y, v, r and l respectively when followed by a vowel." Though one recent English translation ran to more than thirteen hundred pages, the four thousand sutras that Panini created to describe Sanskrit’s phonology, morphology, and syntax can be recited in around two and a half hours.

Concision was only one of Panini’s goals. He wanted his account of Sanskrit to be exhaustive as well. This ambition was far greater than it might at first seem: Panini didn’t want his system just to describe all the features of Sanskrit; he wanted it to be capable of generating a virtually infinite number of well-formed words and grammatically correct sentences. Any Sanskrit utterance from the Vedas, or any possible Sanskrit sentence created elsewhere in the world, should be derivable using Panini’s system.

This aim led Panini to his most important innovation. The sutras of the Ashtadhyayi were expressed as a set of procedures for transforming linguistic inputs (for example, the equivalent of the English to be) into various well-formed Sanskrit outputs (such as they are and they have been, instead of they been and they have are). He structured these rules so that they would interact in highly complex ways—like the steps of a tough algorithm, or the lines of a computer program. The outputs that were produced by some rules could become the inputs of other rules, and could combine with other outputs to become the inputs of still further rules—and so on. Through combinations of a finite number of general rules and specific exceptions, the system could transform basic linguistic inputs (many of which were listed in appendices to the Ashtadhyayi) into a limitless number of grammatical words and sentences—some of which may not even be part of actual