Trajectory Of A God

Siva is unique in many ways. He is ascetic and erotic, creator and skull-bearer, vagabond and all-powerful—probably the only deity so elastic in his qualities. He does not follow the stages of human life as do Rama or Krishna but has an entirely adult existence. Unlike Vishnu who has avatars, Siva has a family, an entourage, and stories about his family's origins are wildly contradictory. Some claim that Ganapathy came mysteriously from Siva's semen flying in one direction but not, apparently, from a sexual union of Siva and Parvati whose love-making had astonished even the gods. One such story, Chitgopekar feels, is significant in itself as well as because most historians seem uneasy about Parvati's outspokenness to Siva. This is the one where Parvati, piqued at her unimportance in Siva's household, creates Ganapathy entirely on her own from the scuff of her body.

The evidence of Siva and his entourage examined by Chitgopekar begs questions. Why are there fewer statues of the marriage of Siva and Parvati in tribal Madhya Pradesh and more of the defiant Mahisasuramard-ini? Why are there barely any hymns to Siva in the Vedas while the Puranas burst with stories about him and his entourage? When, how and why did the change occur?

Chitgopekar's basic argument is that Siv-aism, like any other historical formation, is determined by its material conditions, and that it evolved differently at different places and times. To use E.P. Thompson's precise word, it is a "fluency". Like many other historians, Chitgopekar clarifies that the period was not a monolithic golden age but was in turmoil, often violently so, and that its religious cults and practices were not monolithic either.

Chitgopekar's tables of the district—and deity-wise distribution of sculptures—make her thesis sharply clear. For instance, as against 22 sculptures of Siva as Bhairav, there are 58 of Uma-Mahesvar, and 33 of Durga as Mahisasuramardini. Sculptures of or with females in them occur from the 10th to the 12th centuries and had to do with the acculturation of those on the fringes of the new Brahmanic centres that came up because of land grants to Brahmins. These fringe peoples were chiefly tribals who were allowed into the brahmanic system, but only as shudras who, under the Vedic system, were not allowed to perform sacrifices, recite Vedic mantras, or be initiated.

When the Brahmins began to use tribal labour to cultivate the new land-grant areas, they included the tribals' Mother Goddesses in the pantheon as a "spiritual sop", but chiefly in the form of Uma-Mahesvar. Other evidence also bears out the complexity of the accommodation as well as the cultic tensions between local and outside deities. Though the Mother Goddess is included as the consort of the male god, according to the rules for depiction, she is not really equal in power. Yet some of the inscriptional epithets, which historians usually do not study as carefully as Chitgopekar, describe Siva in relation to his consort, as if he were her appendage.

In spite of tensions, Chitgopekar argues, there was no violence between the cults because of their give-and-take from which Siva benefited, eventually becoming an all-encompassing deity. Indian universities do not have departments of religious studies, but to show how a deity evolved is a method for the historical study of religion, as Chitgopekar has proved. Altogether, Encountering Sivaism is well worth reading.