The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

who was king but who among the people had a plow), kings (more precisely, rajas) do also stillmatter. They are, however, no longer all that we would like to know about. The crucial momentsfor cultural history are not necessarily the great imperial moments, as historians used to thinkthey were, the moments when Alexander dipped his toe into India or the Guptas built theirempire. For some of the richest and most original cultural developments take place when thereisn’t an empire, in the cracks between the great dynastic periods. And although the historicalrecords of inscriptions and coins tell us more about kings (the winners) than about the people(the losers), there are other texts that pay attention to the rest of the populace.When we cannot date events precisely, we can often at least arrange things in a rough butready chronological order, though this leads to a house of cards effect when we are forced toreconsider the date of any text in the series. The periodizations, moreover, may give an oftenfalse suggestion of causation. o We cannot assume, as philologists have often done, that the textsline up like elephants, each holding on to the tail of the elephant in front, that everything in theUpanishads was derived from the Brahmanas just because some Upanishads cite someBrahmanas. We must also ask how the new text was at least in part inspired by the circumstancesof its own time. Why did the Upanishads develop out of the Brahmanas then? What about thestuff that isn’t in the Brahmanas? “Well (the speculation used to go), maybe they got it from theGreeks; it reminds me of Plato. Or perhaps the Axial Age, sixth century BCE and all that? Orhow about this? How about the Indus Valley civilizations? Lots of new ideas must have comefrom there.” Since there is no conclusive evidence for, or against, any of these influences, beforewe look to Greece we must look to India in the time of the Upanishads to find other sorts offactors that might also have influenced their development—new forms of political organization,taxation, changes in the conditions of everyday life.Even an imported idea takes root only if it also responds to something already present inthe importing culture; 3 even if the idea of reincarnation did come from Greece to India, or fromMesopotamia to both Greece and India (hypotheses that are unlikely but not impossible), wewould have to explain why the Indians took up that idea when they did not take up, for instance,Greek ideas about love between men, and then we must note how different the Upanishadsarefrom Plato even in their discussion of ideas that they share, such as reincarnation.Moreover, to the mix of philology and history we must add another factor, individuality.The question of originality is always a puzzle, in part because we can never account forindividual genius; of course ideas don’t arise in a vacuum, nor are they nothing but the sum totalof ideas that came before them. Individuals have ideas, and those ideas are often quite differentfrom the ideas of other people living at the same time and place. This is particularly important tokeep in mind when we search for the voices of marginalized people, who often achieve asindividuals what they cannot achieve as a group. People are not merely the product of a zeitgeist;Shakespeare is not just an Elizabethan writer.In Indian history, individuals have turned the tide of tolerance or violence even againstthe current of the zeitgeist. The emperors Ashoka and Akbar, for example, initiated highlyoriginal programs of religious tolerance, going in the teeth of the practices of their times.Someone with a peculiar, original, individual bent of mind wrote the “There Was Not”(nasadiya) hymn of the Rig Veda, and the story of Long-Tongue the Bitch in the JaiminiyaBrahmana, and the story of Raikva under the cart (one of the earliest homeless people noted inworld literature) in the Upanishads. And these individual innovators in the ancient period did notmerely compose in Sanskrit. They also lurked in the neglected byways of oral traditions,sometimes in the discourses of women and people of the lower classes, as well as in the