Kinship, Caste and Class (Mahabharata)

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT History Class XII (Themes in Indian History Part I), Chapter 3.

A boy refused a teacher, and paid with his thumb

Ekalavya, a young hunter from the forest-dwelling nishada community, wanted to learn archery from Drona, the Brahmana teacher of the Kuru princes. Drona refused to take him as a pupil. Ekalavya went home, made a clay image of Drona and practised before it, until he grew better than every prince. When Drona saw this, he asked for Ekalavya's right thumb as his fee, so that his favourite pupil Arjuna would remain unrivalled.

One story, and it already tells you about birth, status and power. This chapter reads the Mahabharata, a huge epic that grew over about a thousand years, as a window into the society of c. 600 BCE to 600 CE: how families were arranged (kinship), how people were ranked (caste) and who held wealth and why (class).

The text and the scholars who tamed it

The Mahabharata is a colossal epic of over 100,000 verses in its present form, with a central story about two sets of warring cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas. It was composed over roughly a thousand years, from about 500 BCE. Because so many hands worked on it, versions differ from place to place.

In 1919 a project began at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune under the Sanskritist V.S. Sukthankar to prepare a Critical Edition. Scholars collected Sanskrit manuscripts in different scripts from all over the subcontinent, from Kashmir and Nepal to Kerala and Tamil Nadu. They compared them and chose the verses common to most versions. The project took 47 years, finishing in 1966, and the volumes run to over 13,000 pages.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: The Critical Edition was begun in 1919 by Sukthankar and completed in 1966. In reality: it did not recover one "original" Mahabharata. It presented the verses common to most manuscripts and listed the differences at the foot of the page. The many regional readings are themselves evidence that the epic kept growing and changing in different places.

Why a historian cannot just believe a text

Every text or inscription is written from the viewpoint of certain social groups. A historian therefore asks: who composed it, for whom, in what language, and how did it circulate? Sanskrit texts were mostly produced by and for Brahmanas. Pali, Prakrit and Tamil works help recover other voices, because they were closer to the speech of ordinary people.

For the Mahabharata historians also separate narrative (stories) from didactic sections (teaching about social norms; didactic means meant for instruction). The didactic parts were probably added later. The epic is called an itihasa, "thus it was".

By tradition the author is Vyasa.

Two views. For the exam: Archaeology can support a text. B.B. Lal dug at Hastinapura in 1951–52 and found five occupation levels, and the epic's picture of a rich, crowded city fits the later levels. Another reading: Historians caution that finding a city named in the epic does not prove the war took place as the story tells it. Descriptions of urban splendour may have been added after towns flourished from the sixth century BCE, so text and spade need not agree.

Kinship: who counted as family

Sanskrit texts use kula for the family, jnati for the larger network of kin and vamsha for lineage.

Patriliny and matriliny. Patriliny traces descent from father to son, grandson and so on; under it, sons could claim the resources, including the throne, of their fathers. Matriliny traces descent through the mother. The Mahabharata is a feud over land and power between two groups of cousins of the Kuru family, and after the Pandava victory patrilineal succession was proclaimed. From about the sixth century BCE most ruling dynasties claimed to follow patriliny, though brothers sometimes succeeded, and in exceptional cases a woman like Prabhavati Gupta held power. The wish for sons was not only royal: a Rigvedic mantra used at marriage asks for fine sons.

Marriage rules. Brahmanical texts preferred marrying a daughter outside one's own group. Endogamy is marriage within a unit (kin group, caste or locality), and exogamy is marriage outside it. Kanyadana, the gift of a daughter, was a father's religious duty. Polygyny is a man with several wives, and polyandry is a woman with several husbands.

From about 500 BCE Brahmanas compiled the Dharmasutras and Dharmashastras. The Manusmriti, compiled between c. 200 BCE and 200 CE, is the most important. They recognised eight forms of marriage: Brahma, Daiva, Arsha, Prajapatya, Asura, Gandharva, Rakshasa and Paishacha. The first four were considered good and the last four were condemned.

Gotra. From about 1000 BCE Brahmanas classified people, especially Brahmanas, by gotra, a category named after a Vedic seer, all of whose members were regarded as his descendants. Two rules followed. A woman gave up her father's gotra and took her husband's on marriage, and people of the same gotra could not marry.

The Satavahana exception. Satavahana kings ruled in the Deccan, and their inscriptions show that queens such as Gotami, Vasithi and Hariti kept their father's gotras after marriage. Some belonged to the same gotra as their husbands, which is endogamy, not the Brahmanical ideal. Several rulers had more than one wife. Endogamy within kin, such as cousin marriage, was and still is common in south India.

Metronymics. Satavahana kings are named after their mothers, such as Gotami-puta, "son of Gotami" (puta is Prakrit for son). The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad also lists teachers by mother's names.

Two views. For the exam: Metronymics suggest that mothers were important, but Satavahana succession was generally patrilineal. Another reading: Historians remind us that being named after a mother does not show that descent went through women. The names might signal a mother's status, and the evidence does not by itself prove matriliny.

Pause and predict: a king is called Gotami-puta. Does that prove his dynasty followed matriliny?

Check your answer: No. The name honours his mother, but the throne still passed from father to son, so descent was patrilineal.

Caste: the ideal and the real

The Dharmasutras and Dharmashastras describe a fourfold varna order, with Brahmanas first and Shudras and "untouchables" at the bottom, and claim position was fixed by birth.

How Brahmanas tried to enforce this. They said the order had a divine origin. In the Purusha sukta of the Rigveda the Brahmana comes from the mouth of Purusha, the Kshatriya from the arms, the Vaishya from the thighs and the Shudra from the feet. They advised kings to rule by it, and they argued that status was by birth. Stories in the Mahabharata, like that of Ekalavya, supported these ideas.

Kings who did not fit. The rule said only Kshatriyas could be kings. In reality, the origin of the Mauryas was disputed (Buddhist texts call them Kshatriyas, Brahmanical texts give them a low origin), the Shungas and Kanvas who followed them were Brahmanas, and the Shakas of Central Asian origin were called mlechchhas (outsiders or barbarians) by Brahmanas. Yet the Shaka ruler Rudradaman restored the Sudarshana lake, and his inscription is one of the earliest long inscriptions in Sanskrit.

Pause and predict: the Shastras say only Kshatriyas should be kings, yet the Shungas and Kanvas were Brahmanas. What does this tell you about how to use a Shastra as evidence?

Check your answer: A Shastra shows the ideal that its Brahmana authors wanted, not necessarily what happened. Historians compare such rules with inscriptions, coins and other texts to see where practice differed.

The Satavahana ruler Gotami-puta Siri-Satakani claimed to be a unique Brahmana (eka bamhana) and a destroyer of the pride of Kshatriyas, and said that he stopped intermarriage among the four varnas. Yet he made a marriage alliance with the family of Rudradaman, a Shaka. The ideal and the practice did not match.

Jati. Jati is another word for social category, also based on birth in Brahmanical theory, but unlike varna (fixed at four) there was no fixed number of jatis. New groups such as the nishadas and occupations such as the suvarnakara (goldsmith), which did not fit the four varnas, were classified as jatis. Jatis sharing an occupation formed shrenis, or guilds.

The silk weavers of Mandasor. A stone inscription of about the fifth century CE from Mandasor (Madhya Pradesh) records a guild of silk weavers who migrated from Lata in Gujarat to Dashapura (Mandasor). Some members took up other callings, such as music, writing, religion, astronomy and warfare, and the guild together built a sun temple. Members shared more than a craft.

Merchants. Sanskrit texts call merchants vanik. The Shastras say trade belongs to Vaishyas, yet in the play Mrichchhakatika by Shudraka the hero Charudatta is both a Brahmana and a sarthavaha, a caravan merchant. A fifth century inscription calls two donor brothers kshatriya-vaniks.

People outside the varna order. Forest-dwellers such as the nishadas, nomadic herders and speakers of non-Sanskritic languages were called mlechchhas, but ideas and beliefs moved between them and Brahmanical society. The story of Hidimba, a rakshasi who married Bhima and bore Ghatotkacha, is read as a marriage with a non-Brahmanical community.

The bottom of the order: chandalas

Brahmanas classified some groups as "untouchable" on a belief in purity and pollution. Chandalas handled corpses and dead animals. The Manusmriti ordered them to live outside the village, use discarded utensils, wear the clothes of the dead and iron ornaments, and not walk about villages and cities at night. They disposed of unclaimed bodies and served as executioners.

Chinese Buddhist travellers noted the same. Fa Xian (fifth century CE) wrote that untouchables had to sound a clapper to warn of their approach, and Xuan Zang (seventh century CE) observed that executioners and scavengers were made to live outside the city.

Resistance in a Pali story. In the Matanga Jataka the Bodhisattva is born a chandala named Matanga, who marries a merchant's daughter, Dittha Mangalika. Their son Mandavya fed 16,000 Brahmanas but refused alms to his ragged father, who replied that those who are proud of their birth and ignorant do not deserve gifts. The story suggests chandalas sometimes challenged the prescribed order.

Class: who owned what

Wealth was meant to follow varna. Only Shudras were prescribed servitude, so Brahmanas and Kshatriyas should have been richest, and kings and priests are usually shown as wealthy.

Gender and property. In the dice game Yudhisthira staked his property, his brothers, himself and finally Draupadi. The Manusmriti said that the father's property was to be divided equally among sons after the parents' death, with a special share for the eldest, and that women could not claim a share. Stridhana, literally "a woman's wealth", was what she received at marriage. A woman could keep it, her children could inherit it and her husband had no claim on it. But the Manusmriti warned women against hoarding family property without the husband's permission.

Challenging birth. Buddhists recognised social differences but did not regard them as natural or fixed, and rejected status by birth. In the Majjhima Nikaya, Kachchana, a follower of the Buddha, tells king Avantiputta that a wealthy Shudra could have a Brahmana, Kshatriya or Vaishya as an obedient servant, so varna did not decide a person's worth.

Sharing wealth in the south. In ancient Tamilakam generous chiefs were respected and misers were looked down upon. A poem in the Sangam anthology Purananuru describes a poor but generous chief at Irantai who ordered a spear from the village blacksmith to earn the means to give to bards.

Beyond varna: a social contract. In the Sutta Pitaka, a Buddhist text, early beings lived in peace until greed, anger and deceit set in. They then chose one among them to punish wrongdoers, paying him a share of rice. He was the mahasammata, "the great elect". The myth makes kingship a matter of human choice and taxes a payment for service, in contrast to the Brahmanical idea of divine origin.

Two views. For the exam: Polyandry in the Mahabharata, where the Pandava brothers share Draupadi, is explained in the text in several ways, which suggests the Brahmanas who reworked the epic were uneasy with it. Another reading: Some historians say the practice was known in the Himalayan region, and others link it to a shortage of women in times of war. The text's own explanations include tales of earlier births.

How the epic travelled

The Mahabharata kept growing in many languages. Regional stories were woven in, and it was retold in sculpture, painting, plays and dance. The contemporary Bengali writer Mahashweta Devi retold the episode of the house of lac in "Kunti O Nishadi", with a nishada woman's point of view at the centre. J.A.B. van Buitenen began an English translation in 1973 and left it unfinished at his death in 1978.

Timeline

Key terms

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Kings, Farmers and Towns gives the political and economic background (Mauryas, Shakas, Satavahanas, guilds) in which these social rules operated.
• Next: Thinkers, Beliefs and Buildings follows the Buddhist and Jaina challenge to birth based status in religious ideas and monuments.