The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

Was the famous author killed from a beating? From carbon monoxide poisoning? From alcohol withdrawal? Here are the top nine theories

 Like his life's work, Edgar Allan Poe's death remains shrouded in mystery. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

By Natasha Geiling

smithsonian.com

October 7, 2014

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article "Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman, " Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . . ." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. As Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state. 

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in her biography "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his finals days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J. P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1949: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. . . . He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking lead to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance, or his second-hand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy Metal Poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July of 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond" were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days—the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms—E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October of 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain Tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses. 

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol. 

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu—which might have turned into deadly pneumonia—on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his second-hand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians—or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." "Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

---

For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms." 

Source: smithsoniamag

This tragic documentary series tells the stories of Dalit students who were driven to suicide

CASTE DISCRIMINATION

University of Hyderabad scholar Rohit Vemula's death has once against brought up the issue of casteism in institutions of higher learning.

Scroll Staff  · Yesterday · 02:45 pm  · India



The suicide of 26-year-old Rohith Vemula, one of five Dalit students expelled from their hostel at the University of Hyderabad two weeks ago, has put the focus back on the way Indian academic institutions treat students from backward castes.

Vemula and the others had been suspended by the university after a leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad accused the five students of having assaulted him. The five claimed this was a false allegation and had been staging a sleep-in protest outside their hostel since the expulsion.

Even though the 26-year-old said that no one was responsible for his suicide, his final note did make reference to the way he was feeling. "I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this," Vemula wrote in his suicide note.

Those are words that would be familiar to Dalit students across the country, who often have to deal with severe bullying and ostracism in many Indian institutions. The video above, from a three-part documentary series called The Death of Merit, documents the suicide of a 20-year-old Dalit student at IIT Roorkee in 2011.

Manish Kumar Guddolian jumped to his death from the fifth floor of his hostel. While the police put the death down to depression, his family members spoke to the filmmaker about the many months of bullying he faced in college from a group of students who tried to put him down by calling him names like "chamar" and circulating a video of his photos to be laughed at.

The college administration's response when the matter was taken to them was to suggest he should focus on his studies and perhaps he should be moved out of the hostel. His parents and relatives tell their part of the story in the film.



Another case covered by the series was the suicide of a 22-year-old medical student Dr Jaspreet Singh who was routinely failed in exams by one professor. The aspiring surgeon was a bright student, who scored well all through school and in college, barring one subject. On 27 January 2008, he hung himself to death on the fifth floor of his college's library.

Following his suicide, when his papers were examined by an external body at the behest of the National Scheduled Caste Commission, he passed. College authorities tried to put his suicide down to depression despite Singh explicitly mentioning professor NK Goel in his suicide note. The professor though went scot-free and continues to work at the Government Medical College in Chandigarh.



Reservations are another source of harassment for young Dalit students. Balmukund Bharti, a final year MBBS student at AIIMS committed suicide on March 3, 2010. His parents allege that the professors told him that people like him who come on the back of reservations can never become doctors.



We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

'I loved Science, Stars, Nature': Suicide by suspended Dalit student sparks nationwide protests

Dalit issues

'I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body,' wrote scholar at University of Hyderabad before he hanged himself.

Scroll Staff  · Yesterday · 08:01 am

Students in Delhi and other parts of the country are planning to hold events on Monday to protest the suicide on Sunday night of Rohit Vemula, one of five Dalit scholars who had been expelled by the University of Hyderabad last year for an altercation with a rival student group.

Vemula, a PhD scholar, hanged himself in a hostel room, university authorities confirmed to the Times of India.

“No one is responsible for my this act of killing myself,” Vemula wrote in a suicide note released by the university authorities. “No one has instigated me, whether by their acts or by their words to this act. This is my decision and I am the only one responsible for this. Do not trouble my friends and enemies on this after I am gone. “

The young scholar and member of other student groups had been on a hunger strike since earlier on Sunday to demand a revocation of their suspension in August. The university authorities had barred them from entering the administrative building, hostels, libraries, mess and other common areas. For the past two weeks, Vemula and the four other suspended students had been sleeping in the open to protest the decision.

According to a statement issued by the Joint Action Committee for Social Justice at University of Hyderabad, the five Dalit students had been suspended after a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad falsely accused them of having assaulted him in August.

Student associations in Hyderabad, Delhi and other parts of the country have announced that they will boycott classes and hold memorial events to protest the circumstances that led Vemula to kill himself

Here is the text of Vemula’s note:

    “Good morning,

    I would not be around when you read this letter. Don’t get angry on me. I know some of you truly cared for me, loved me and treated me very well. I have no complaints on anyone. It was always with myself I had problems. I feel a growing gap between my soul and my body. And I have become a monster. I always wanted to be a writer. A writer of science, like Carl Sagan. At last, this is the only letter I am getting to write.

    I loved Science, Stars, Nature, but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since divorced from nature. Our feelings are second handed. Our love is constructed. Our beliefs colored. Our originality valid through artificial art. It has become truly difficult to love without getting hurt.

    The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of star dust. In very field, in studies, in streets, in politics, and in dying and living.

    I am writing this kind of letter for the first time. My first time of a final letter. Forgive me if I fail to make sense.

    May be I was wrong, all the while, in understanding world. In understanding love, pain, life, death. There was no urgency. But I always was rushing. Desperate to start a life. All the while, some people, for them, life itself is curse. My birth is my fatal accident. I can never recover from my childhood loneliness. The unappreciated child from my past.

    I am not hurt at this moment. I am not sad. I am just empty. Unconcerned about myself. That’s pathetic. And that’s why I am doing this.

    People may dub me as a coward. And selfish, or stupid once I am gone. I am not bothered about what I am called. I don’t believe in after-death stories, ghosts, or spirits. If there is anything at all I believe, I believe that I can travel to the stars. And know about the other worlds.

    If you, who is reading this letter can do anything for me, I have to get 7 months of my fellowship, one lakh and seventy five thousand rupees. Please see to it that my family is paid that. I have to give some 40 thousand to Ramji. He never asked them back. But please pay that to him from that.

    Let my funeral be silent and smooth. Behave like I just appeared and gone. Do not shed tears for me. Know that I am happy dead than being alive.

    'From shadows to the stars.'

    Uma anna, sorry for using your room for this thing.

    To ASA [Ambedkar Students Association] family, sorry for disappointing all of you. You loved me very much. I wish all the very best for the future.

    For one last time,

    Jai Bheem

    I forgot to write the formalities. No one is responsible for my this act of killing myself.

    No one has instigated me, whether by their acts or by their words to this act.

    This is my decision and I am the only one responsible for this.

    Do not trouble my friends and enemies on this after I am gone."

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

Other read:  Hyderabad: Suspended Dalit student hangs himself  Indian Express

David Bowie has been secretly cremated without a funeral or any family and friends present

The iconic singer told his loved ones he wanted to “go without any fuss” and not have a funeral service or public memorial

 AKM-GSI-XPOSURE
Family man: David Bowie with wife Iman and daughter Lexi

Music legend David Bowie has been secretly cremated without any of his family or friends present.

The iconic singer told his loved ones he wanted to “go without any fuss” and not have a funeral service or public memorial.

A source in New York told the Mirror: “There is no public or private service or a public memorial. There is nothing.”

Since the singer's death on Sunday music lovers have been speculating about what plans the legendary showman had for his funeral.

But unbeknown to his millions of fans around the world, his body was quietly cremated shortly after he died.

*******************

Sir Elton John praised Bowie for dealing with his cancer battle with dignity.

He said: “What I loved about him towards the end was his incredible privacy during what must have been 10 years of incredible bad luck with illnesses, heart attacks, cancer, whatever.

"He kept it private in an age we’re living in with Twitter when everyone knows everything about everything - he kept it to himself.

"He made two albums without anybody knowing he was making them. He had treatment for his illnesses without anyone knowing or anyone saying anything.

"And that is the mystique of the man, because we know David Bowie the figure, the singer, the outrageous performer, but actually, we don’t know anything about him - and that’s the way it should be in music and should be in any art form whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, one of Bowie’s closest aides told how it was almost as if the singer knew he was going to die two days after his birthday.

********************

“He certainly planned for Blackstar to be released when it did – his birthday.

“It’s too coincidental. On the song The Girl Loves Me he asks ‘where the f*** did Monday go?’

“I’ve got no evidence but I think he did.

"It was like Mozart writing his requiem or the famous Dennis Potter who kept writing scripts on his deathbed.”

Read full article: mirror

Was the Ramayana actually set in and around today’s Afghanistan?

LITERATURE AND MYTH

An examination of a book by physicist Rajesh Kochhar debunks the notion that the events of the epic took place in modern-day India.

Dhiman Dasgupta  · Apr 26, 2015 · 08:45 am

 Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons


History is said to be the original discipline in the faculties today known as humanities. This is owing to the fact that every discipline in knowledge discourse has a history – even abstract disciplines like mathematics or astronomy – and every piece of history has a geophysical contextuality.

Ever since Herodotus (484 BC - 425 BC, Greek-occupied Turkey) started the discipline, he recorded events during the reign of four Persian kings and chronicled life and society in their times. These were times of conflict between Greece and Persia and had a geographical contextuality.

Herodotus also speaks of “India”, where he saw the Himalayan marmot bathing in gold dust. Much later, deconstructing his text led to the conclusion that the great father of historical praxis must have passed through the North West Frontier province and reached the base of Hindu Kush.

This posed a question, which Herodotus did not ask himself: if he had indeed travelled to “India”, which “India” was this? For that matter, if he was “Greek”, which “Greece” did he live in? Similarly. if Ram of the epic poem Ramayana was an “Indian”, where was this “India” situated?

The so-called Ram Setu

A ship that wishes to sail from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal has to pass through the Indian Ocean to the south of Sri Lanka. The voyage would have been 30 hours shorter if it could have travelled along the Gulf Of Mannar, which separates India and Sri Lanka, but this isn’t possible. For there are thousands of small submerged rocks beneath its surface, stretching like a bridge across 47 km between the two countries. As a result, the sea is between one and 30 metre deep here, which isn’t favourable for sailing.

The British government of colonised India as well the government of independent India had often planned to dredge the channel to make it suitable for sailing; but the plans have remained elusive for various reasons. At present, for instance, Hindutva followers believe that this is the bridge built by an army of monkeys, as described in the Ramayana, which Ram and Lakshaman crossed to conquer Sri Lanka.

Their demand is that, far from dredging, let the Archaeological Survey of India declare this bridge a national monument. Not that the colonisers were any less fundamentalist. In 1804 a certain British cartographer named the structure Adam’s Bridge – according to him this was the bridge described in the Bible which Adam crossed to scale a mountain peak, where he meditated for 1,000 years while standing on one leg.

Even before this, we have seen Marco Polo describe the structure as a bridge, as did Al-Biruni in the book he wrote in 1030 CE. In other words, it has long been held that this row of rocks beneath the surface of the water is a bridge.

Not exactly a bridge

According to geologists this structure is actually a limestone shoal, the outcome of natural processes. Between 300 and 30 million years ago, a portion of the Indian subcontinent is believed to have broken off because of continental drift to form the island of Sri Lanka. The debris that this fragment of land left behind at birth in the water as it drifted away led to the creation of this so-called bridge.

It may have jutted out of the water at some point in history, in which case it might have been used as a bridge. But there is considerable doubt whether the users belonged to the age of the Ramayana. This is because the inhabitants of Sri Lanka went directly from the Stone Age to the Iron Age; the use of copper was not very prevalent here. On the other hand, the Ramayana is a tale from an advanced Copper Age – an epic in verse from a period two or three thousand years before the Iron Age.

Where was Ramayana set?

Let us drop the preamble and get to the point now. If the Lanka mentioned in the Ramayana was not the Sri Lanka of today, where was it located? Where did Ram belong, for that matter? Wherever he may have lived, he was certainly not an inhabitant of what is the Ganges valley today, or of “Ramjanmabhoomi” Ayodhya. For, civilised man did not live in the forest-infested Ganges valley before the Iron Age, since there were no axes with which to clear the vegetation before iron was discovered. There were no swords either, which proves that the Ramayana, unlike the Mahabaharata, is not an epic of the Ganges valley. It makes no mention of swords – the bow and arrow are the primary weapons in it.

The primary objective of this essay is to point to the geographical location of the Ramayana. It is not the writer who has arrived at the answer, nor an Indologist like Max Mueller or even a historian or archaeologist. The person in question is Rajesh Kochhar, a physicist with an inclination for history, who has broken through the traditional techniques of history in his work The Vedic People – Their History and Geography.

How the Ramayana is different from the Mahabharata

The primary difficulty of discussing the ancient history of India lies in the necessity of first demolishing several well-established inaccuracies, such as the Aryan Invasion Theory, for instance. Spun by white men and broadcast by colonial historians, this old wives’ tale is still taught in schools and colleges, with half of any written work – measured in terms of paper, ink and effort - being expended on it. We shall not entertain it. We will only examine whatever can be determined through the social and geographical pointers available in the Ramayana.

There are two other fundamental differences between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata – in the rivers and in the divine pantheon. In the Mahabharata the Ganga and the Yamuna are almost ubiquitous, but they’re completely missing from the Ramayana. In the Mahabharata we see the powerful presence of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar – but they’re absent from the Ramayana. We do not find these two rivers and these three gods together in the Rig Veda.

However, the rivers and gods that are to be found in the Rig Veda are also to be found in the Ramayana – the rivers Saraswati and Sarayu, and the original trinity of Agni, Varun and Pavan. From this it is easy to surmise that the Ramayana is a Rig Vedic epic. Which period was this? It would not be correct to estimate this using our current calendar: it would probably not be possible either. An approximation can be made from the sequence of events.

The somras clue

Vedic nomads travelled from the Eastern Europe to Bactria (present day Afghanistan). From here they went to Persia (today’s Iran). During their migration to Persia there was probably a battle for power amongst the gods, which led to the birth of the Avestan religion. As a result, Indra, the king of gods, became an inferior figure in the Avesta, while Yama, the god of death, turned into the finest of the gods. Worshipping Agni is a prominent practice within the Parsi community, but Hindus do not worship this ancient god. This indicates that the Rig Vedic age predated Persia. Kochhar has provided clues to whether this was the Afghan branch of the Vedic journey.

The first such clue that Kochhar alludes to is the Vedic drink somras. It was so important in ancient Vedic life that an entire mandala or chapter of the Rig Veda has been devoted to it. The importance of soma is evident in the Avestan Zend scripture – it is referred to as haoma in Persia. It is seen that the closer the Vedic nomads get to the Indian peninsula, the more they seek continuously new alternatives to the soma plant; that was how important somras was.

But the original soma plant was to be found only in what is modern day Afghanistan and Persia or Iran. In 1951 the German historian Karl Friedrich Geldner proved that the ephedra plant was what was described as soma in the Rig Veda. Ephedrin or somras is not alcohol – this intoxicant is an alkaloid. Kochhar’s investigations led to the discovery of four varieties of ephedra, found in Afghanistan, Iran, the northern Himalayas, and the Hindu Kush.

What we learn from summer solstice

There are 49 cosmic hymns in the Rig and the Yajur Vedas whose meanings have not been explained. But one particular hymn from Vedanga Jyotish informs us that the longest day of the year, or summer solstice, comprised 18 periods of daylight and 12 of night. Day and night are of equal length on the Equator; in the higher latitudes, summer days are longer than nights.

The latitude at which the proportion of daylight and darkness is 3:2 is 34 degrees North. It is worth noting that the cities to be found around this latitude today are Herat and Kabul in Afghanistan. In other words, the place and time of the composition of the Vedanga Jyotish is the same as that of Vedic Afghanistan and Iran. This second piece of evidence offered by Rajesh Kochhar further strengthens the perception of the location and time of the Rig Veda.

In search of the rivers

Kochhar has deconstructed the Rig Veda in search of the Saraswati and the Sarayu, the two rivers also mentioned in the Ramayana. Here too our current history has come in the way.

There is a tiny river named the Sarayu in Uttar Pradesh, which flows into the Ghaghara, which in turn merges with the Ganga. Many people consider the rainwater-fed Saraswati in the Aravallis, flowing along the Ghaggar (not to be confused with the Ghaghara) basin the mythical Saraswati. On viewing the scans of North-Western India made by the Russian Landsat satellite between 1972 and ’79, it is natural to assume that the Ghaggar was a wide river. It flows into the Rann of Kutch.

The scan reveals the basin of a dried up older river, which is up to 8 km broad in some places. It was this that led to the hasty conclusion of this basin’s belonging to the original Saraswati.

From Neil Roberts’s The Holocene it is clear that the basin of this river widened to the north of the Rann of Kutch because of the accelerated movement of a glacier during the previous Ice Age. But deconstructing the Rig Veda doesn’t suggest any of this. The Saraswati has been referred to as non-perennial towards the end of the Veda. The original stream of the Ghaggar enters India from present-day Pakistan, drying up in the Thar desert. Kochhar believes this is the non-perennial Saraswati.

However, the Saraswati of the Rig Veda is extremely powerful, grinding rocks with sheer force. Its roar subsumes all other sounds. And the Sarayu of the Rig Veda is immensely wide and deep, the mother river. None of these descriptions matches the actual rivers in present-day India with those names.

Hymn No. 5 | 53 | 9 of the Rig Veda says, “May the Rasa, Krumu, Anitabh, Kuva or Sindhu not be able to stop you; let the deep Sarayu not be an obstacle.” The order of the rivers clearly moves from east to west. So the Sarayu undoubtedly flows to the west of the Indus.

Kochhar believes it is the 650-km river known as the Hari-Rud in Afghanistan, whose source is in the Hindu Kush mountains. It flows past the city of Herat and then for 100 km along the Iran-Afghanistan border before disappearing in the Karakom desert of Central Asia.

In the Avesta we find the Saraswati as the Harahaiti – the similarity in sound is noticeable – which enters Iran along the combined basin of the river Arghandar on the Afghan-Iran border and the river Helmand. According to Kochhar, it is this Helmand that is the Vedic Saraswati river.

The source of the Helmand is in the Koh-i-Baba mountain range. Flowing for 1,300 miles through the heart of Afghanistan, the Vedic Saraswati joins the Vedic Drijadbati or Arghandar. The Avesta identifies this wide river as the Hetumanta (or, in varations, as Setumanta). In Iran the Saraswati is named the Harahaiti, which flows into the inland lake Hamun-e-Sabari in the Saistan area of northern Iran.

The conclusion

The political map of the ancient world, of the Copper Age, provides an extraordinary realisation. The kingdoms of the two main political powers – the Persians and the Greeks – all lie between and around the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. None of these is a coastal civilisation, however.

This raises a question. What did ancient man refer to as a sea? The Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Campian Sea are all saltwater lakes, and not seas in the way we understand them today. This make us wonder: perhaps the Lanka of the Ramayana was an island in the Hamun-e-Sabri.

The one thing that’s obvious: wherever it was that Ram and Lakshman went from Afghanistan, it could not have been to present-day Sri Lanka, for that would have meant crossing the Indian peninsula. And since Ravana, the lord of Lanka, was also partial to somras, it is unlikely that he went very far from the land of soma after abducting Sita.

Although it is not possible to prove archaeologically, there is considerable reason to assume that the lineage of Dasarath (and of Ram), the Ikshvakus, were from western Afghanistan. For the Puranas say that King Kubalasa slayed a demon on the shore of the Sabari. Vishwamitra received his second birth where the Saraswati met the sea. And Valmiki discovered Sita on the shore of the Sarayu. Which is why there is little room for doubt that today’s Hamun-e-Sabri is the sea mentioned in the Ramayana, one of the islands in which was the kingdom ruled by Ravana, lord of the rakshases.

The focus of attention for those studying the lost history of India is the contentious issue raised by Hindutva historians, who have repeatedly asserted that western historians have been unable to identify the roots of ancient India. We find these assertions in the writings of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, as well as in  those of certain lesser known right-wing historians. It is surprising how easily conclusions unsupported by the array of Vedic texts can be arrived at because of mindless adherence to a popular brand of politics.

The rock formation between India and Sri Lanka could well be preserved, but not as Ram Setu or Adam’s Bridge. Let it be protected as a geological feature. For no matter how far one looks, no relationship is evident between this Lanka and the Lanka of the Ramayana.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

A short note on the short history of Hinduism

Opinion

While it may be that the religious streams now grouped together under the rubric of Hinduism are ancient, the word 'Hindu' was not applied to them until relatively recently.

Mukul Dube  · Yesterday · 05:30 pm

Photo Credit: DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP

The word “Hindu” is now taken to mean a person who follows what is called the Hindu religion, or Hinduism. It was not always so.

In Sanskrit (as in the earlier Indo-Aryan), “sindhu” means a large body of water and its usage is applied to rivers and oceans. The word was turned into the proper name of the largest river in the region, now called the Indus. The terms “Hind” and “al Hind” came to be applied to the Indian sub-continent – the region across the river – by Persians and Arabs starting around the 6th century BCE. The geographic name was applied to ethnicity and culture also. It had nothing to do with religion until much later.

Proponents of the “Hindu” religion, in particular those who follow the ideology of Hindutva, claim that it is the world’s oldest. While it may be that the religious streams now grouped together under the rubric of Hinduism are ancient, the word “Hindu” was not applied to them until relatively recently by those who followed these religious streams or religions. In DN Jha’s essay “Looking for a Hindu identity”, he writes: “No Indians described themselves as Hindus before the fourteenth century” and “Hinduism was a creation of the colonial period and cannot lay claim to any great antiquity”.

In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus.

Jha continues: “The British borrowed the word ‘Hindu’ from India, gave it a new meaning and significance, [and] reimported it into India as a reified phenomenon called Hinduism.”

Well before this, Abd al-Malik Isami’s Persian work, Futuhu’s-salatin, composed in the Deccan in 1350, uses the word  ”hindi” to mean Indian in the ethno-geographical sense and the word “hindu” to mean “Hindu” in the sense of a follower of the Hindu religion”. But this usage remained uncommon.

The idea of tolerance

Every religion has always been hostile to other religions. I suggest that the well known hostility between Shaivism and Vaishnavism makes them religions and not “sects”, and that the distinction between these categories is without meaning.

These two dominant streams also showed hostility towards the many other religious streams that are now lumped together in “Hinduism”: and of course the blood-letting between Brahmanical religions on the one hand, and Buddhism and Jainism on the other, is too well known to require a mention.

It is absurd to describe Hinduism – or any other religion – as tolerant. The statement heard throughout the world of “I shall defend my religion to the death” clearly means that if the defender does not die in the fight, the attacker will. What did the various akharas of India do if not fight to the death, and what were they if not religious?

The confounding of the geographical name “Hindostan” or “Hindustan”, which is Persian in origin, with the synthetic compound “Hindu” + “sthana” is an example of how low people can stoop, whether out of ignorance or out of bloody-mindedness. The fact is that “Hindostan” was in use centuries before anyone thought to describe a religion as “Hindu”.

It is a delicious irony that those who seek to defend their “Hindu dharma”, primarily against Muslims, do not have the ghost of an idea that the very name of their religion came originally from a region which is now associated with Islam.

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Source: scrollin

Faith over rationalism: The Indian elite are making the same mistake as their Pakistani counterparts

SAFFRON STROKES

Starting from politics in the 1980s, faith has now even entered India’s premier colleges.

Shoaib Daniyal  · Today · 09:15 am

In 1947, India’s ruling elite set out a development blueprint for the nation that was surprisingly rational for the country’s income levels. Ravaged by two centuries of colonialism, while India was one of the poorest countries in the world in 1947, its Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of technology and progress. Nehru even coined the term “scientific temper”, which would be a goal of the Indian state in this new age. The prime minister was an agnostic writing to Gandhi in 1933 that he had “drifted away” from faith and his personal rationalism it seems, set the bar for independent India. The Indian state’s new “temples” would be dams, institutes of technology and science. The messiness of religion, both as ideology and communal identify was sought to be hidden away.

Even in the Nehruvian age, though, while the narrative in Delhi was all about science and rationality, the states were already jostling to use faith as driver. For example, starting from just after Nehru’s death, state governments started to pass laws which restricted the freedom of Hindus to adopt other faiths, injecting a theocratic agenda into matters of administration. By the 1980s, the old Nehruvian agenda had been weakened enough for this theocratic agenda to start to target the Centre. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party started its massive agitation for a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid. Overturning Nehruvianism, the BJP explicitly grounded its politics in faith. The religious faith of lakhs of Indians would overturn any legal process, claimed senior party leader Lal Krishna Advani. By 2014, the Hindutva movement had delivered its greatest success: under Narendra Modi, the BJP had been able to garner a Lok Sabha majority. This also meant a new low for the Nehruvian agenda of rationalism and scientific temper.

Modi set the bar

Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself set the ball rolling with amazing claims that cosmetic surgery and genetic sciences existed in ancient India. A minister from Goa wanted to “cure” people of homosexuality and in Rajasthan, rape accused “godman” Asaram Bapu is featured as a saint in a Class III textbook endorsed by the state government. While religion in politics has, to some extent, always been there, the new dynamics post May 2014 are even pushing it into higher academia which has, till now, been insulated from this sort of irrationality.

The new BJP government kicked things off with history, appointing Yellapragada Sudershan Rao the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research. Not only was Rao unknown as a historian but he also thought that the caste system was a good thing and considered the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, to be literally true. Given that the ICHR was a funding body for historians, it was quite clear the direction in which academia was now turning. In October, 2015, Delhi University organised a seminar where flying chariots and televisions sets from the Mahabharat were discussed in all seriousness.

Ramdev in JNU

A fortnight ago, Baba Ramdev, the television yoga guru who now also runs a pharmaceutical company, was asked to be the keynote speaker at the valedictory ceremony of the 22nd International Vedanta Congress at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Now Ramdev might be a good televangelist, but to lecture to scholars on theology is a bit much. After all, he holds views which suggest that yoga is a cure for AIDS and thinks that homosexuality is a reflection of “criminality and sick mentality”. While Ramdev’s invitation to JNU was cancelled as outraged students protested, this tweet did ensure that most right-thinking people won’t be inviting him back as a scholar of theology any time soon.

The recently concluded Indian Science Congress, which Nobel Prize winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan called a “circus”, didn’t fail to disappoint, discussing topics such as the health benefits of blowing a shankh (conch) and “Lord Shiva as a greatest environmentalist in the world”. As a full circle, back to where it all started in the 1980s, news broke on Tuesday that Delhi University will allow a far-right organisation to hold a seminar on the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya on the campus. On its website, the organisation argues that since “For a great majority of Indians, Lord Shri Rama is central not only to their spiritual life but also their physical being”, a temple at Ayodhya needs to be built.

Retreat of rationalism

This retreat of rationalisation from the academic space is an especially dangerous development. While letting in people with less than academic views into campuses is often spun as an issue of free speech, that is a false, if common, argument used by the religious right across the world. Creationists in the United States have argued that not letting Intelligent Design be taught in schools is a violation of free speech, a specious argument that has been struck down by US courts. Freedom of expression is a right to be allowed to say or think what one wants; it is not a right to be allowed into a particular campus or textbook.

In many ways, of course, views such as these have existed in India for a long time, but have only now been given this sort of elite exposure. This, though, is hugely troubling development because by giving these kooky ideas an official stamp of legitimacy, it will encourage their rapid spread. To get an idea of the harm that legitimising such ideas can do, one only needs to peek across India’s western border where Islamist dictator Zia-ul-Haq kicked off proceedings by organising conferences on “scientific miracles” in the 1970s. The apogee of this sort of complete devaluation of rationalism is that Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a top Pakistani nuclear engineer, has published papers proposing that djinns be tapped to generate energy.

This might seem hilarious – and it is – but India needs to use this as a dark example. Already, we have the somewhat odd sight of the chief of the Indian Space Research Organisation publicly going to a temple to have space mission being blessed by a deity. It does not bode well that our elite classes today present faith and not rationality as a virtue to be emulated.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in

Source: scrollin

'The RSS is conspiring to gain a hold of all academic institutions': Ousted BHU professor

EDUCATION MATTERS

Sandeep Pandey discusses the circumstances of his removal as a visiting professor and alleges that the RSS influenced the decision.

Scroll Staff · Today · 06:30 pm

'The RSS is conspiring to gain a hold of all academic institutions': Ousted BHU professor

 Photo Credit: AFP

On December 21, Banaras Hindu University convened a board meeting and decided to show the door to Magsaysay award winner and visiting professor Sandeep Pandey, allegedly for his “anti-national activities”. Pandey had been teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology-BHU for two-and-a half years. He sparked a storm in the academic community with his allegation that his political ideology had him a target of the Narendra Modi government.

Here's what he told Scroll.

    I am an alumnus of BHU only. I did my engineering from the same university in 1992-1996 and I have been teaching here since 2013 as a visiting faculty. My contract here was yearly and on renewable basis. I was teaching a few branches of chemical engineering and a development studies course which I floated during my tenure. There were more than 150 students registered for that course.

    Last night [January 6], I received the formal communication from the university’s end that my tenure has been discontinued and there were no academic reasons given for it.

    Ever since the current Modi government came into power, some sections have been trying to complain about me to the Ministry of Human Resources Development. The HRD minister Smriti Irani also called the Director Rajeev Sangal and told him that I am politically active and my actions need to be controlled.

    In another instance, the Vice Chancellor GC Tripathi got miffed at me for sitting at a protest with 40 contract employees of BHU who were ousted recently. I just supported them but VC asked me why did I feel the need to go there. He even said that if I want to be Jayaprakash Narayan then I should quit the university and join politics.

    In another meeting, Professor Dhananjay Pandey, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, went on to say that people who should be in jail are part of the faculty here but he didn’t take my name. But he didn’t renew my contract and it was delayed for three months before the director acted on it.

    They have alleged that I am a Naxalite and involved in anti-national activities. They had decided long ago that I need to be shown the door, they were just looking for the right opportunity. In the meeting, they forced the director to remove me from my position.

    The director was the one who appointed me and he was in my favour but people with RSS links pushed their way through. They don’t have any proof to back their allegations against me which is why their letter is so cleverly framed that it can’t be taken up in the court. It doesn’t mention any reason whatsoever but I am not going to be quieted down.

    I will use the Right to Information to ask for the minutes of that meeting and if there are these allegations there then I will definitely move court on this.

    Around 2002, I had attended an event of Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) from where it all started. Back then, this was an underground organisation. Some families of former Naxalites were being felicitated in that meeting and I was merely on the stage there. And that’s when the RSS activists started saying that I am a Naxalite.

    Moreover, I was in the citizens Defence Committee constituted for Prof SAR Gilani who was accused and later acquitted of all charges of his involvement in the Parliament attacks of 2001. They use that against me to say that I am an anti-national and a terrorist.

    The real problem that the government and the right-wing agents is that I work among the students on the campus and fight on issues. I run a forum in the name of Acharya Narayan Dev who has been a VC of BHU, we discuss social and development issues like farmer suicides, poverty and economic inequality there. The forum was getting popular among the students.

    We worked for small farmers, labourers who need help in fighting for their rights. We raised an agitation against Coca Cola, fought against land acquisition bill and organised marches.

    They think that if I am not here, right-wing elements will be able to gain more ground in the campus. They are worried about securing their support among the students. Students have a nimble brain and they are attracted to the kind of ideologies they are exposed to and they want to expand their territory.

    An ideological battle is being waged in our educational institutions. The RSS is trying to gain control over all institutions to propagate its own ideology. It’s sad that very incompetent people are being brought in at the helm of important institutions. Educational standards have gone out of the window. Nobody discussed any of my academic credentials and all the discussions revolved around just my political record and these baseless allegations. This is a conspiracy to take control over educational institutions and dominate the ideological discourse.

    Going forward, I don't think I will fight for my job any longer even though I want to teach. It was a contractual thing so I don't see the point. But the larger battle for freedom of expression and human rights will continue.

As told to Mayank Jain.

We welcome your comments at letters@scroll.in.

Source: scrollin

శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2016

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2016

Why is Ram misogynist, but not the Buddha?

Opinion

The world is conditioned to see the Ramayana and Manu-Smriti as anti-women, but not the Buddhist lore.

Devdutt Pattanaik  · Today · 10:30 am

Hinduism is patriarchal. No doubt about it. So are Christianity and Islam, Sikhism and Shinto, Jainism and Judaism. But Buddhism? It is not the first religion that comes to mind when we talk about misogyny.

The assumption is that Buddhism is rational, modern, agnostic and liberal in matters of gender and sexuality. Book after book has conditioned us to see the celibate and chaste Buddha as a kind of androgynous, asexual, gentle sage with a beatific smile. Yet, some of the earliest and most systematic documentation of rejection of female sexuality in Indian literature is from Buddhist scriptures, especially the rules of monastic discipline (Vinaya pitaka), traditionally attributed to the Buddha himself.

Rules of monastic discipline

Consider this:

* There more rules for nuns (bhikkunis) than monks (bhikkus), 331 as against 227, because while everyone has to control their desires women have the additional burden of not “arousing the desires of men”.

* Monks are advised to sleep indoors, not outdoors, after an incident where women had sex with a monk while he, apparently, was sleeping under a tree. Monks who do not wake up, or do not yield to temptation despite being accosted by women for sexual pleasure, are seen as innocent and not expelled from the monastic order. Monks who voluntarily submit to female charms are declared defeated (parajita).

* In the tale of Sudinna, a young monk breaks his vows of celibacy after his old parents beg him to give his wife, whom he had abandoned, a child so that his family lineage may continue. When this is revealed, the Buddha admonishes him thus: “It is better for you to have put your manhood in the mouth of a venomous snake or a pit of burning charcoal than a woman.”

* In one conversation, the Buddha states, “Of all the scents that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the tastes that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the voices that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman. Of all the caresses that can enslave, none is more lethal than that of a woman.”

• Buddhist monks, unlike other monks of that period, are not allowed to wander naked for fear they would attract women with their charms, believed to be enhanced because of their chastity and celibacy.

• Monks are advised to walk straight, without moving their arms and bodies too much, looking at the ground and not above, lest they get enchanted by “the glance of a woman”. Monks are also advised not to walk with single women, or even sit in the company of men, for it might lead to gossip.

• In a conversation with Kassappa, Bakulla says that in 80 years he has not only not had sex, he has not even entertained thoughts of women, or seen them, or spoken to them.

• Once a woman laughed and showed her charms to Mahatissa, but he remained unmoved. When asked by her husband if he found his wife unattractive, Mahatissa said he saw no woman, only a heap of bones.

* In the story of Sundarasammudha, who leaves his wife to become a monk, the wife approaches the husband and tells him, in what is an allusion to the ashrama system of Hinduism, that they should enjoy the pleasures of marital life till they are old and only then join the Buddhist order together and attain nirvana (liberation through cessation of desires). The monk replies that he would never submit to such seductions which are the snares of death.

* The texts repeatedly describe celibate monks as embodiments of dhamma (the path of enlightenment) while the lustful insatiable women are described as embodiments of samsara (the cycle of death and rebirths).

* Sangamaji left his wife and son to become a monk. One day, his wife and son come to him and beg him to come back but he does not respond, and shows no sign of husbandly or fatherly instincts and so is praised by Buddha of achieving true detachment and enlightenment. A true monk, for whom “female sexuality is like the flapping wings of a gnat before a mountain” is a vira (hero).

* Buddha makes his half-brother Nanda join the monastic order but Nanda is engaged to marry the most beautiful woman in the land and pines for her. So Buddha shows him celestial nymphs who live in the heaven of the 33 gods (Swarga of Hindu Puranas). Buddha asks Nanda if his fiancée is as beautiful as these nymphs, and Nanda says she is like a deformed monkey compared to these nymphs. Buddha says that if he continues to walk the path of dhamma he would be reborn in this heaven and be able to enjoy these nymphs. Spurred by this thought, Nanda actively and diligently engages in monastic practices. By the time he attains enlightenment, all desires for the nymphs and the fiancée are gone.

* Different types of queers (pandakas) are listed who should not be ordained as monks. These include hermaphrodites, transsexuals, eunuchs, cross-dressers, and effeminate gay men. This is done following stories of monks being seduced, or courted, by pandakas, and also because keepers of a nearby elephant stable mocks a monastery because one of its members is a pandaka, who constantly courts them sexually.

* Female hermaphrodites, women who dress like men, or those of deviant sexuality or simply those who do not look like women and are “man-like” women cannot be ordained as nuns.

* There are rules that refer to bestiality. Monks are warned against too much affection for cows and female monkeys.

The code’s influence

Initially, none of these strictures were codified. There was no Vinaya Pitaka. But as many people joined the monastery (vihara), they started behaving in certain ways that were deemed unworthy of monks and seekers of Buddha-hood. People also started making fun of the Buddhist way. So to protect the reputation of the dhamma and the sangha, Buddha began putting down these rules.

These codes were compiled orally and narrated by Upali (a barber before he became one of Buddha’s 10 chief disciples) in the first Buddhist council, a year after Buddha’s death. This happened 2600 years ago. A thousand years later, these rules were systemised and codified by one Buddhaghosha who lived in the monastery at Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka.

By the time Islam arrived, Buddhism had already waned in most of India. But the Buddhist idea equating women’s sexuality with entrapment and pollution informed Hindu monastic orders (mathas), especially those instituted by Adi Shankara. Shankara was often called a Buddhist with Hindu packaging, by his critics. In his monastic order, he went a step further: there were no nuns.

If we believe the theory that “Jesus lived in India”, this code of monks could even be said to have influenced the anti-women stance outside India too – in Christianity as well, for while the Buddha abandoned his wife, Yashodhara, Jesus never married at all. Significantly Buddhaghosa lived around the same time as St Augustine of Hippo came forth with his anti-sex and anti-women trope in the Catholic Church.

The turning point

It is interesting that in all writings of patriarchy and misogyny related to India, scholars quote the Ramayana and the Manu Smriti, yet historically these were composed after the Vinaya Pitaka. Buddha lived in pre-Mauryan times while the Ramayana, with its concern for kingship, was written in post-Mauryan times. Arguments of oral traditions and astrology-based dating that place Ram to pre-Buddhist times appeal only to nationalists, not historians. Manu Smriti and other dharmashastras were written in the Gupta era when Brahmins played a key role in legitimising kingship in much of peninsular India. The pre-Buddhist Vedic rituals speak of female sexuality in positive terms as they are concerned primarily with fertility and wealth-generation. The pre-Buddhist Upanishads do not bother much with gender relations and are more interested in metaphysics. Much of Buddhist literature in Pali was put down in writing long before Sanskrit texts (Ashokan edicts in Pali language date back to 2300 years; the earliest Sanskrit royal inscriptions have been dated to only 1900 years ago). This makes Buddhist writings the watershed of Indian literature, after which womanhood came to be seen as polluting, obstacles to the path of wisdom.

We could, of course, argue that that most educated Buddhists were originally Brahmins and so transplanted Hindu patriarchy into Buddhism, that the Buddha had no such intention. We can insist that Vedas and only the Vedas, are the source of misogyny. This follows the pattern of “good” Buddhism and “bad” Hinduism structure we find in most colonial and post-colonial academic papers.

The complete silence on the subject of misogyny so firmly entrenched in the Buddhist scriptures, and traced to the Buddha, is quite remarkable. Research on this topic is well known but restricted to academic circles. There is ‘Buddhism after Patriarchy’ by Rita Gross and ‘Bull of a Man’ by John Powers, for example. But there is a strong desire in these books to explain away the patriarchy, rather than put the spotlight on them. It is almost as if the scholars are irritated, even embarrassed, that the facts interfere with contemporary perceptions of the Buddha.

Abandoning sex, which effectively means abandoning women, for a “higher” purpose – be it enlightenment or spirituality or service to the nation – has since become a popular model, embraced by religious sects, as well political organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It has been glamourised and valorised as the ultimate indicator of masculinity and purity. We can trace, at least one major tributary of this idea, to the Vinaya Pitaka of the Buddha, who abandoned his wife, without her consent.

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Source: scrollin