Religions of South Asia 2011 -- Vol. 5
Religions of South Asia
Religions of South Asia / editors: Anna King, Dermot Killingley. Vol. 5 (2011) = Special issue: Genealogy and History in South Asia. - London : Equinox Publishing, 2012.
ISSN 1751-2689 (Printausgabe)
ISSN 1751-2697 (Online-Ausgabe)
URL: Equinox: Religions of South Asia
Abstract: This piece introduces the topic of genealogy as an important topic in the humanities in general, and in the study of religions and the study of the religions of South Asia in particular. Then it introduces a project on that topic at Cardiff University, and the international conference held in connection with it. It then provides an overview of the collected papers of that conference, which are presented in this volume.
Abstract: This paper analyses the three genealogical lists found in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, not only as ascriptions of authority for the White Yajurvedic tradition, but as integral to the literary production of this text. I analyse the theme of ‘inheritance’ in Upaniṣadic narratives and in genealogical lists and show how a comparison of the two allows for a deeper understanding of the inclusion of genealogical lists in this text. In particular, I posit a new interpretation of the metronymic list found at the conclusion of Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 6, arguing that its ‘problematic’ form is not so problematic after all given its context.
Abstract: This paper takes a literary approach to the major vaṃśas in the Brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads. I will demonstrate that the vaṃśas follow a number of structural and compositional conventions, which are employed to construct sacred histories, indicate different branches of descent, combine different lineages, and claim authoritative transmissions vis-à-vis other lineages. By treating the vaṃśas as a literary genre, rather than as an empirical historical record, I hope to invite a new appreciation for their form and creativity, as well as to open up new ways for reading them.
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between etymology, genealogy and the literary exploration of the past in early South Asia. By means of a close reading of a range of materials drawn from the Atharvaveda, Brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads, as well as the Nirukta, the Bṛhaddevatā and the Mahābhārata, I will demonstrate that there is a progression from etymology, to expanded etymology, by which I refer to narratives spun from the details of etymologies, to full accounts of birth and descent, that is to say, genealogy, and, from there, to larger-scale historical accounts. I will thus show that etymology played an important part in the formation of consensus understandings of the past in early South Asia.
Abstract: The Mahābhārata royal patriline is tracked and contextualized here in relation to two prominent themes: its concept of a divine plan (somewhat paralleled in the Rāmāyaṇa) and its chief genre term itihāsa or ‘history’. It is found that these two themes intersect in the Mahābhārata at the point where the goddess Gaṅgā ‘descends’ into the royal line as the wife of King Śaṃtanu. Gaṅgā’s intervention then provides new means to interpret the part played by Śaṃtanu’s second wife, Kālī Satyavatī. Attention is given to etymological clues to the ways these two mothers, and their sons Bhīṣma and Vyāsa respectively, supply continuity to the dynastic line.
Abstract: This paper discusses ancestral genealogies descending from the moon and the sun, as found in the Mahābhārata, the Harivaṃśa, and the Rāmāyaṇa. In particular, the paper explores changes in the way that the ancestry of the Bhārata kings was reckoned, and shows how certain narratives may be understood in terms of those changes.
Abstract: This paper examines the Harivaṃśa’s presentation of the story of the Syamantaka jewel, which marks what appears to be an abrupt and awkward transition between the poem’s genealogical (vaṃśa) and biographical (carita) genres. I argue in this paper that the Syamantaka episode should be understood within its genealogical context, and that the story’s apparent displacement from Kṛṣṇa’s actual biography, far from representing an instance of poor editing, tells us a great deal about the importance of genealogy in early Indian thought.
Abstract: This paper looks at three types of lineage in traditions about the Buddha. First, it traces the Buddha’s Śākya ancestry and shows how he puts an end to his genealogical lineage and transforms it into a Śākya monastic lineage. Second, it argues that the Buddha acts as a point of convergence for the synchronic lineage of his many past lives (Jātakas), and then as a dispersion point for the lineage of his many relics. Finally, it sees him as a pivotal figure in the ongoing lineage of Buddhas through the ages, past and present.
Abstract: Although the Buddhists, according to the logic of the life-story of the Buddha, could not claim a direct lineage of descent from the Exalted One himself—his only direct offspring, Rāhula, having become a celibate monk—the family background of the Buddha could not escape the general temptation to create a family connection, as in the case of other important religious or cultural founding figures. This paper traces and discusses these attempts, expressed in and transformed into narratives, which are spread across a broad variety of Buddhist sources. It argues that the urge to create such (mostly incomplete) lineages resulted from another necessity: that of political and religious legitimation.
Abstract: The Apadāna is a well-known but relatively little-studied text. The Therī-Apadāna, the section of the text on women, tells of the lives of female disciples of Gotama Buddha. Alongside versified narrative accounts of the lives of these women during the time of Gotama Buddha, the text reveals the past lives of these women, under former buddhas. These past-life accounts of women as disciples of former buddhas add a new dimension to the notion of female discipleship in early Buddhism. Gotama was not alone in having a fourfold community of monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen; former buddhas had the same. The Therī-Apadāna establishes a narrative recounting that women were motivated and enabled to practise in the remote past, and that former buddhas allowed for the ordination of women just as Gotama did. In order to highlight this, in this paper I look at a section of past life narrative in the Therī-Apadāna that is repeated in the accounts of six nuns.
Abstract: Buddhist and Jain texts contain many stories that trace a person’s biography through multiple lives, illustrating karmic consequences, progress towards spiritual goals, and the preservation or deconstruction of relationships across several births. These stories can be seen as a form of genealogy, since they explain a person’s identity and form an alternative lineage to the family. This paper explores the ways in which karmic genealogies are constructed in some early Buddhist and Jain narratives, and how these interact with other forms of lineage, namely the family and networks of significant religious figures.
Abstract: This paper examines the forms of descent recorded in the Brāhmī inscriptions of early historic India (c. 300 bce–300 ce). I will argue that they afford us the possibility of viewing how non-noble groups traced kinship, lineage and ancestry. We see this in the development of kin networks; in the articulation of descent and proprietal control among landed and mercantile groups; in the patriarchal norms laid down for women; and in the use of metronymics and gotras. Finally, by tracing the slow emergence of genealogies in the inscriptional record, I show that they must be linked to changes in socio-economic, literary and political domains.
Abstract: A critical examination of dynastic genealogies for pre-Islamic India derived from literary, epigraphic and numismatic sources reveals that they regularly suppress fraternal conflicts and other irregularities in the lineages. Although normative texts such as the Arthaśāstra and various D harmaśāstra treatises present succession by the king’s eldest son as the norm, reading between the lines shows that this principle was often overruled or ignored. Some Indian dynasties of Iranian and Central Asian descent, notably the Western Kṣatrapas, followed a system of collateral, brother-to-brother succession which is characteristic of Central Asian polities, but here too a critical scrutiny shows that this principle was subject to various irregularities. In effect if not in principle, both systems, primogeniture and collateral succession, provide mechanisms to prevent or at least minimize the damage from fraternal conflicts, but both were evidently limited in their actual effects.
Abstract: The stone inscription found in the Kevala Narasiṃha Temple on top of the Rāmagiri (Ramtek, Maharashtra) is an unusual personal document telling the story of a Vākāṭaka princess (Atibhāvatī) who was married to her maternal uncle (Ghaṭotkacagupta), viceroy in Vidiśā (first half of the fifth century ce). This Ghaṭotkaca lost the succession war against Skandagupta, after which the princess’s brother, the Vākāṭaka king Pravarasena II, brought the widowed princess back home to Vidarbha. The inscription is incomplete; only one third of the original text is readable. A step-by-step analysis and reconstruction of the praśasti part of the inscription reveals the dynastic interrelation of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka dynasties, the construction of which was motivated by political considerations Rrather than by considerations of lawfulness (dharma).
Abstract: The paper sets out to explore the ways in which genealogies, and other literary devices, are used to constitute the identity of Harṣavardhana in the Harṣacarita authored by Bāṇabhaṭṭa. I argue that it is important not only to focus on the avowed subject of the text, but also to examine the ways in which the author represents himself—given that both poet and patron may not have had strong claims to the positions they occupied, this intertwining is possibly significant. Finally, I turn to the ways in which other men (and women) are represented in order to contextualize the depiction of the poet and his patron. I suggest that while viewing the text solely as an instrument of legitimation may seem somewhat reductionist, the ways in which the author deploys a range of aesthetic and other resources (including explicit and implicit parallels and connections with deities and legendary figures) indicate that such texts were integral to complex political and cultural processes.
Abstract: This paper investigates the extent and significance of a genealogical component within all the narratives dealing with the five famous characteristic topics (pañcalakṣaṇa) of the Purāṇas: creation, re-creation, lineage, periods of Manu, and the histories of dynasties. Whilst there is some evidence of a concern with genealogy in the narratives of creation and re-creation, lineage as both subject and framing device is far more in evidence in the other three, as these deal with a distinctive ‘social and political history’ of Jambudvīpa portrayed in a mythological mode. Two lineage narratives from the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa are studied, and on the basis of these it is shown that there is a much greater concern with resolving breaks in the lineage and dealing with new infusions into a lineage than with giving a simple account of lineal succession. Such a concern may reflect a realistic assessment by the Purāṇic composers of the complex socio-political situation they actually confronted and the attempts they had to make in order to validate (and translate) this in terms of Brahmanical social theory. Finally, a similar example of lineage problems and class mobility is illustrated from a near contemporary Jātipurāṇa from Maharashtra.
Abstract: In their epigraphical genealogies the Pallavas of South India (fourth to ninth centuries CE) claim to belong to a brahmin lineage that gradually embraced the duty of kings. As such, these genealogies present a definition of kingship that differs from its Brahmanical conceptualization. I show how the Pallavas accounted in their ‘mythical genealogies’ for their royal occupation through a transformation in two steps: from pure brahmins to brahmin-warriors, and from brahmin-warriors to kings. I explain how the birth of the eponymous hero Pallava, from Aśvatthāman and a mother who has a strong link with royalty, marks the shift towards kingship. I describe how this royal status of the dynasty is confirmed by the integration of royal figures from other dynasties into the ‘pseudo-historical genealogies’ that link the eponym to the historical kings. I then explore the mythical patrimony of the Pallavas, discussing how we might understand in a broader context the ideological purport of this royal claim to both brahmin and kṣatriya descent.
Abstract: This paper deals with the historical figure of Ravivarman Kulaśekhara (c. 1266–1317 ce), a king of southern Kerala and for a while emperor of South India, who claims in his inscriptions to be a yadupati like his father, and at the same time appears to be genetically a Yādava by his mother, according to the matrilineal system of inheritance through the sister’s son (marumakkattāyaṃ) that was prevalent in pre-modern Kerala among non-brahmins. Moreover, in taking over the Cera imperial heritage in accordance with the solar aspects of his kuladevatā (Viṣṇu Padmanābha), Ravivarman pretends to assume a solar dimension compatible with his lunar-family origin by claiming to be nāmāntara-karṇa
Karṇa being son of the solar god through the Yādavī Kuntī). The Jaiminīyasaṃhitā of the Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa, an epic probably composed in Kerala under the reign of the same Kulaśekhara (there is an obvious reference to this text in one of his inscriptions), tells a unique story about the brahmin (first) wife of King Sagara, and also emphasizes the role of Sagara’s mother who is a Yādavī queen, as if the famous solar king Sagara served as a model for Ravivarman. The paper compares and discusses the genealogical narratives of the epigraphic testimonies and the Purāṇic accounts, and analyses their symbolic value in order to understand the royal ideology expressed according to the Brahmanical tradition within the peculiar socio-cultural context of Kerala.
Abstract: This paper deconstructs the royal genealogy (vaṃśāvalī) of Chambā, a western Himalayan kingdom in present-day Himachal Pradesh, and compares it with other such attempts to recast and/or reassert the dynastic lineage in the contemporary epigraphs issued over a period of eight hundred years. My assumption is that genealogies should be critically treated, like any other literary texts or other cultural objects which are influenced by, or have a bearing on, contemporary social and political issues. I argue that genealogies are systemic responses to strains and ruptures, and that they manipulate the lineage and social distinctions. They help not only in forging links with larger Indian political and socio-cultural ideologies, but also in contriving a sacred-cultural space through cultic affiliations, through the appropriation of history and charismatic personalities, and by antiquating legitimatory symbols to lend validity to the state process and manufacture ‘consent to rule’. Genealogies are also the sites of authorized perceptions, whereby the rulers manipulate facts and events in order to fashion the past in a particular perspective. In the process, genealogies not only manipulate history, but also (re)invent the trajectory of the lineage, cultural tradition and polity.
Abstract: Genealogy has always been a kingly preoccupation, especially in the Indic world where kṣatriya status (whether genuine or fabricated) was a sine qua non for the exercise of legitimate power. It was no less true of the Turco-Mongol dynasty known as ‘Mughal’ which came to dominate vast expanses of the subcontinent from the sixteenth century onwards. True, the Mughals could boast of such illustrious ancestors as the world-conquerors Chingīz Khān and Tīmūr. Yet, from the moment they set foot in India, they became aware of the limited legitimacy they would be able to derive from such genealogical credentials in a region where neither Chingīz Khān and his successors nor Tīmūr had left very good memories. On the other hand, their descent from such famous figures constituted a real asset vis-à-vis their Ottoman, Safavid and Uzbek competitors and among the Turco-Mongol and Iranian elements of their nobility. The fact that the Mughals could afford neither to alienate their Indian subjects nor to dispense with the international prestige they derived from their lineage explains to a large extent the fluctuating genealogical strategies they adopted during the first century or so of their dominance.
Abstract: How do genealogical accounts in sparsely literate regions come into being, and what forms do they take? What are the factors that help sustain their appeal over centuries of oral transmission? Finally, what happens to their content when the story is committed to writing? This article addresses these questions by examining the evolutionary stages of a martial-historic oral epic from the western Himalayas. In looking into the details of the events that brought a local lineage to dominance, it delineates the multiple strands of bardic composition—acculturative, sociological and mythic—that address social, political and religious issues of relevance to its audience so as to produce an account of the past that is both credible and efficient as a tool for legitimating political dominance. Although largely faithful to the oral tradition, the story’s transition to script is shown to produce changes that affect its historicity and its capacity to deliver a persuasive explanation of the past.
Quellen: Equinox Publishing
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