Day 90 : Book Excerpt : Fields of Blood

We do not know exactly how the Aryans established their two kingdoms in the Doab, the “Land of the Arya,” but they can only have done so by force. Events may well have conformed to what social historians call the “conquest theory” of state establishment. Peasants have much to lose from warfare, which destroys their crops and kills their livestock. When the economically poorer but militarily superior Aryans attacked them, it is possible that, rather than suffer this devastation, some of the more pragmatic peasants decided to submit to the raiders and offer them part of their surplus instead. For their part, the raiders learned not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, since they could acquire a steady income by returning to the village to demand more goods. Over time this robbery may have been institutionalized to become regular tribute. Once the Yadavas and Kuru-Panchalas subjugated enough villages in the Doab in this way, they had become in effect aristocratic rulers of agrarian kingdoms, though they still dispatched annual raiding parties to the east.

This transition to agrarian life meant major social change. We can only speculate, of course, but up to this point it seems that Aryan society had not been rigidly stratified: the lesser clansmen fought alongside their chieftains, and priests often took part in the raiding. But with agriculture came specialization. The Aryans found that they now had to integrate the dasas, the native farmers with agricultural knowhow, into their community, so the Vritra myths demonizing the dasas were becoming obsolete, since without their labor and expertise, the agrarian economy would fail. The demands of production also meant that Aryans themselves had to toil in the fields, while others became carpenters, metalsmiths, potters, tanners, and weavers. They would now stay at home, while the best warriors were dispatched to fight in the east. There were probably power struggles between the rajas, who wielded power, and the priests, who gave it legitimacy. Breaking with centuries of tradition, all these innovations had to be grafted onto the Vedic mythos.

Their new wealth and leisure gave the priests more time for contemplation, and they began to refine their concept of divinity. They had always seen the gods as participating in a loftier, more encompassing reality that was Being itself, which by the tenth century they had started to call Brahman (“The All”). Brahman was the power that held the cosmos together and enabled it to grow and develop. It was nameless, indefinable, and utterly transcendent. Devas were simply different manifestations of the Brahman: “They call him Indra, Mitra, Naruna, Agni, and he is heavenly noble-winged Garatman. To what is One, sages give many a title.” With almost forensic determination, the new breed of rishis were intent on discovering this mysterious unifying principle; the all-too-human devas were not only a distraction but were becoming an embarrassment: they concealed rather than revealed the Brahman. Nobody, one rishi insisted, not even the highest of the gods, knows how our world came into being. The old stories of Indra slaying a monster to order the cosmos now seemed positively infantile. Gradually the gods’ personalities began to shrink.

One of these later hymns also gave sacred endorsement to the new stratification of Aryan society. Another rishi meditated on the ancient myth of the king whose sacrificial death had given birth to the cosmos and whom the rishi called Purusha, the primordial “Person.” He described Purusha lying down on the freshly mown grass of the ritual arena and allowing the gods to kill him. His corpse was then dismembered and became the components of the universe: birds, animals, horses, cattle, heaven and earth, sun and moon, and even the great devas Agni and Indra, all emerged from different parts of his body. Yet only 25 percent of Purusha’s being formed the finite world; the other 75 percent was unaffected by time and mortality, transcendent and illimitable. There would always be something in the human experience of the natural world that would elude our comprehension. In Purusha’s self-surrender, the old cosmic battles and agonistic sacred contests were replaced by a myth in which there was no fighting: the king gave himself away without a struggle.

The new social classes of the Aryan kingdom also sprouted from Purusha’s body:

When they divided Purusha, how many portions did they make?
What did they call his mouth, his arms?
What do they call his thighs and feet?
The priest [Brahmin] was his mouth; of both of his arms was the warrior [rajanya] made.
His thighs became the commoner [vaishya], from his feet the servant [shudra] was produced.


Thus the newly stratified society, the hymn claimed, was not a dangerous break with the egalitarian past but was as old as the universe itself. Aryan society was now divided into four social classes—the seed of the elaborate caste system that would develop later. Each class (varna) had its own sacred “duty” (dharma). Nobody could perform the task allotted to another class, any more than a star could leave its path and encroach on a planet’s circuit.

~~Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence -by-Karen Armstrong