Climbing Chamundi Hill

For Jennifer Hansen

LITERATURE

India possesses long and diverse traditions of storytelling. They include folktales and myths, both as oral performance and written texts. In fact, the boundary between these ostensibly distinct genres is extremely fuzzy. Some of the oldest and most sacred literary sources in Indian history, the Brahmanas (eighth century
BCE
) and early Upanishads (sixth century BCE), contain stories or fragments of stories that employ universally known folk motifs. One of the stories in
Climbing Chamundi Hill,
“Father Sacrifices Son,” derives from the Brahmanas, where it is told to illustrate a point concerning one of the most prestigious rituals of the Vedic period. The ritual—Rajasuya—was the elaborate coronation of a new king, which was a major rite of passage for the young prince.
Nonetheless, the theme of the story—a god who demands the sacrifice of an elder son—is prevalent around the world. It is a known folk motif in the Stith Thompson motif index.

From the very beginning of Indian literary history, stories, along with parables, riddles, and even jokes, were told in a variety of contexts for various purposes. The large corpus of ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature is rich with examples. The sages of the Upanishads illustrated philosophical insights with the aid of narrative and poetry. Buddhist narrators, including the Buddha himself, told stories to guide followers on the difficult path to
nirvana
or to illustrate moral and spiritual virtues, as the
Jataka
tales or Ashvaghosha's
Buddhacarita
(“Life of the Buddha”) demonstrate.

Some ancient collections of stories combine such religious purposes with more prosaic themes, including narratives about the lives of heroes, the rise and fall of dynasties, or the virtues or follies of gods and humans. The
Mahabharata
(second century
BCE
) and the
Ramayana
(third century
BCE
) are two such vast collections, gathered and told over centuries. Considerably later collections, possessing a stronger religious ideology, are the Puranas, in which the gods themselves act as the characters in a story: Krishna in the
Bhagavata Purana
stands out as the foremost example.

The art of storytelling found a specialized niche in Indian literary history, and religious ideas were not necessarily at the forefront, not even when the stories served didactic purposes. The most renowned example of this genre—known as
katha
(story) literature—is the
Pancatantra
(third century
CE
), a collection of stories and parables with animal actors. These stories successfully migrated westward by way of the Muslim world to Europe, and through Shakespeare and Boccaccio all the way to Hollywood. Scholars believe that these stories belonged in a
royal context and illustrated educational points about statecraft, cunning, and strategic thinking, Several centuries later, additional collections of stories became prominent, pointing perhaps to a huge and now lost corpus of narratives. These collections include Somadeva's
Kathasaritsagra
(eleventh century
CE
), Kshemendra's
Brihat-kathamanjari
(eleventh century
CE
), the
Vetala Pancavimshati
(perhaps eleventh to twelfth centuries
CE
) and the
Shuka Saptati
(twelfth century
CE
). These collections seem to delight in storytelling for its own sake, but they nicely illustrate the complexity of a life lived for pleasure and profit. The premise of the Shuka Saptati, for instance, is that the wife of an absent husband must be entertained to avoid adultery. The
Kathasaritsagara
is even dedicated to Kubera, the Vedic god of wealth. All of these books, and many others besides, are repositories of stories from a vast folkloristic and literary imagination that encompasses all areas of life and delights in the affairs of humans, gods, animals, ghosts, vampires, sprites, and godlings. Although these story books are not regarded as sacred, they are widely loved and may paint, in fact, a far more realistic picture of popular Hindu religious life than do the scriptures.

HINDU DHARMA

Several hundred years after the first appearance of religious literature in India, priestly authors began to sort out its goals and social implications. Books called Dharma Sutras, and later Dharma Shastras, fashioned a coherent synthesis out of the multiple norms that previously had guided the lives of Indians. India's now-famous unitary caste system was outlined from the
myriad of social and professional groups that proliferated in village and urban societies. The four main castes, or
varnas,
of this new order were the Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (mercantile and professional groups), and Shudras (servants). The life of each individual male in the upper three castes was further divided into three, then four, chronological stages: the student stage, the householder, the “forest dweller” or religious retiree, and finally the renouncer (
sannyasin
). Implicit in these stages of life was the recognition—perhaps formed in response to Buddhist monastic ideals—that life can be shaped by a variety of values, all of them legitimate. The four primary values or goals explicitly promoted were the four
purusharthas:
for the student, love (
kama
); for the householder, wealth or means (
artha
); for the forest dweller, morality (
dharma
); and for the
sannyasin,
spiritual liberation (
moksha
). The scholars who authored these texts encouraged their readers to value the fullness of life and to seek release from spiritual bondage only as the final goal of maturity.

This social and ethical synthesis reflects a long-standing tension that runs throughout Indian religious history: should one live an active life guided by social concerns (
dharma
), or should one renounce such a life in pursuit of supreme Truth? At the same time that the
dharma
books created their graduated approach, the
Bhagavadgita,
India's best-known sacred book, also grappled with the question. The revolutionary answer of that revered text was devotion to God (Krishna) as the ultimate compromise between
dharma
and
moksha.
But the question is still far from resolved, and many Hindus today do not regard the matter as simply theoretical.

Millions of Hindus who lead the lives of householders in modern India go on pilgrimages to sacred centers throughout
their vast country. The most powerful draw is to Varanasi, where the Ganges River is said to emerge from the locks of Shiva's hair, where it became ensnared as it fell from heaven to earth. A dip in the river, or cremation on its banks, permanently frees the soul from the cycles of death and rebirth. But there are hundreds of lesser pilgrimage sites (
tirthas
) throughout the subcontinent, including Chamundi Hill. For most Hindus, it is the pilgrimage, with its discomforts and deprivations, that most resembles the life of a renouncer on a quest for liberation. In pilgrimage, both men and women become temporary
sannyasins,
freed from the preoccupations of daily life in order to focus on God and on
moksha.
And it is the pilgrimage too that provides a superb opportunity to listen to stories and to reflect on the subtle and paradoxical relationship between the life of
dharma
and the pursuit of liberation. Stories, even entertaining
katha
stories, offer a rich and nuanced context for meditating on that fuzzy boundary between competing goals and on the mysteries of Hindu thought.