The Presence of Self by Perinbanayagam R. S.;

Author:Perinbanayagam, R. S.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2000-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Hindu Identifications

One can best begin an analysis of the Hindu poetics of identity by examining its creation myth. The Hindu version of a creation myth occurs in many early texts with some variation, but with certain central themes that are consistent. Stanley Tambiah summarizes them as follows:

The universe first existed in the “shape of darkness;” then the divine self-existent Svayambhu appeared as “creative power.” He created the waters by his thought and placed his own seed in them; and in that golden egg (hiranyagarbha) he was born as Brahman, the progenitor of the whole world. Thus was formed the first male Purusha famed under the name of Brahman.

The divine one divided the egg into two halves, the heaven and earth, together with the middle of space and the waters and so on. And from himself he created the mind and organs of sensation, the elementary particles, out of which again, by joining with particles himself, he created all beings: gods, the eternal sacrificial fire, wind and sun, time and divisions and seasons, mountains and rivers, speech, merit and demerit, pleasure and pain, and so on, and the four varnas from his own mouth, arms, thighs, and feet. (1976: 20)5

He then not only creates the natural world and its essential features, and does not create a man and a woman as in Judeo-Christianity, but creates the four segments that constitute the Hindu social order—the four varnas. The Brahmins, who were to teach and study the scriptures “sprang” from his mouth; the Kshatriyas, who were to protect the people, “sprang” from his arms; the Vaisyas, those who were to tend cattle, “sprang” from his thighs; and the Sudras, those who were to serve others, “sprang” from his feet.

The physical body, insofar as it was the body of the original human Purusha, becomes the basic metaphor for conceiving the social order itself as hierarchy and a division of labor. In anticipation of Emile Durkheim’s argument, the Hindu theory of a division of labor adduces an integrated social order in which each segment is connected to the others as parts of a body that are connected and create a harmonious whole. What can be more perfect a functioning whole than a human body? And, therefore, what can be questioned about a social order that is similarly organized? Each individual member of this order is also able to derive an identity from his membership in the order and accept the society that results as divinely ordained and unchangeable. It provides the basic metaphor for Hindu identity because every Hindu, as a matter of course, has a varnic terminology of identification. One does not really become a Hindu; rather one is born into being a Hindu. Such birth, defined as a continuation from earlier lives, always delivers an individual into an already existing social structure with a definite identity: He or she has a gender, he or she has a place in a birth order, and he or she has a place in a status hierarchy, caste (varna or jati).

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