What Indians ought to eat and wear, whom they should marry (and when), how much or how little they should procreate, are the constant subject of moral scrutiny in the country.
A post on Quora, dated October 27, recently considered how ancient Indians would feel about the way Indians live and conduct themselves in the 21st century. The answer which received nearly 20,000 “upvotes” (Quora speak for “likes”) was written by a Raj Beau, who describes himself on the question and answer website as someone who is “curious about everything, especially sex”.
The post, approximately 700 words long, is unusual because rather than describing Indian traditions and culture as puritan and ascetic, as self-appointed moral guardians tend to do, it points out that ancient Indians were in fact, fairly liberal.
In order to list the many ways in which Indians have become more “conservative”, Beau borrows heavily from Indian mythological texts, especially the Mahabharata.
For instance, in addition to resorting to the clichéd example of Khajuraho as an instance of the sex-positivity of ancient Indians, Beau points out that it was completely acceptable for Krishna’s gopis to go bathe naked in the local pond. Ancient Indian women, he writes, were open-minded about showing their nude bodies in public spaces, and the veil system enforced on many Hindu women is not true to their culture but borrowed.
In a separate section, Beau writes about past attitudes towards virginity and pre-marital sex using the story of Satyavati, a fisherman's daughter who is married to a prince, Devavrata, but unknown to him, had slept with a sage when she was single, as well as borne him a son.
“Virginity and premarital sex was accepted," writes Beau. "Satyavati had premarital sex with Rishi Parashar and gave birth to Ved Vyas who wrote Mahabharat. So Satyavati was not virgin while marrying King Shantanu.”
“Love marriage was there with name Gandharva Vivaah,” he continues, "but now it is still a big issue in suburban and rural India.”
The post also addresses the matter of cow slaughter and today's cow vigilantes or gau rakshaks.
“Those who do not know anything about a single text about Sanatana Dharma become ‘Hindu Rakshak’, ‘Gau Rakshak’, etc,” complains Beau.
Many incidents of assault, allegedly perpetrated by gau rakshaks, have been reported in the last few years from different parts of India, with the most recent one occurring in Madhya Pradesh, where two women were beaten up for carrying buffalo meat.
But despite Beau's ready examples of ancient Indians who engaged in taboo love affairs, had pre-marital sex and had no last names, wore very little and ate meat regularly, the sexual, caste and class politics of Mahabharata have been questioned by many academics and writers.
In Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, a study of the Mahabharata's characters, writer Iravati Karve had written:
“Besides giving a glimpse into that which is eternally human, old literature of this type makes one aware of cultural alternatives in human choice, and also of the surprising fact that some of the newest literary and philosophical trends are but a new form of an old nagging.”
In Yuganta, Karve humanises the characters of the epic, in the process stripping them of their divine roles. About the position of women in society, she writes:
“During the Mahabharata times the ideal of a woman’s loyalty to her husband differed slightly from that of later times... a woman was the ‘field’ and she had to produce children from any man when her husband demanded. This compulsion to produce sons disappeared later on with the popularity of adoption but along with it also disappeared the tolerant attitude towards any lapse a woman might commit. Women, who were rescued from the hands of the enemy and perhaps were used by them, were never abandoned. They were brought back into the family and given their former status. This attitude was not due to compassion. A woman was a man’s possession. Inability to protect her from the enemy and losing her was a matter of humiliation to him, and rescuing and regaining her matter of pride. This attitude was in complete contrast to the later one and to that of the modern Hindus who refused to accept their rescued wives when they were brought back from Pakistan.”
Karve also tries to solve the mystery of whether Hindus were habitual beef eaters by studying the various references to meat or fat in the Mahabharata. She writes: “What people eat, they offer to their gods, and inversely whatever is offered to the gods is consumed by the people… though cattle is not mentioned as having been an item of offering, new archaeological evidence does show that cattle too was used similarly. Does this mean that beef was eaten as a matter of course and perhaps for that reason finds no special mention, while game does?”
The text also mentions “ghrita”, a fatty substance of viscous consistency, that later came to be known as butter fat, but could well have been cow fat.
Beau cites several examples of inter-caste marriages between Brahmin and Kshatriya characters from the Mahabharata, to prove that the resistance to this type of marriage is a "modern" phenomenon. According to Karve, however, “The relationship of the two prominent classes to each other shows rivalry as well as mutual dependence”.
The other two castes identified in the text, Vaishyas and Shudras, are only vaguely represented at best. “To judge from the Bhagvadgita, the Vaishyas were supposed to have been engaged in farming, herding cattle, and trade; while the Shudras were the servants of all the three classes,” Karve notes.
Mahabharata remains a text with a strong hold over Indian culture and literature, quoted liberally during court rulings and parliament proceedings, present in memes and popular culture. But as Beau's Quora post and Karve's reading of the Mahabharata indicate, both the text and Indian culture itself, are often open to wildly differing interpretations.