Sarama and Her Children Read online

  BIBEK DEBROY

  Sarama and Her Children

  The Dog in Indian Myth

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION AND TRADITION

  LITERATURE AND MODERNITY

  SARAMA

  SARAMA’S CHILDREN IN THE EPICS

  DHARMASHASTRAS AND THE PURANAS

  NITI SHASHTRAS

  POPULAR TALES

  DOGS IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA

  IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION

  NOTES

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SARAMA AND HER CHILDREN

  Bibek Debroy is an economist and is Research Professor (Centre for Policy Research), Professor (International Management Institute) and Contributing Editor (Indian Express group). He has worked in universities, research institutes, industry and for the government. He has published books, papers and popular articles in economics. But he has also published in Indology and translated (into English) the Vedas, the Puranas, the Upanishads and the Gita (Penguin India, 2005). He is now working on an unabridged translation of the Mahabharata in ten volumes to be published as Penguin Black Classics. The book Sarama and her Children splices his interest in Hinduism with his love for dogs.

  for Pari, who gave a new lease of life

  Preface

  Sarama has been in the making for a couple of years. In the Hindu tradition, Sarama is the mother of all dogs. She is the dog of the gods. Thus, dogs are known as ‘sarameya’s.

  I have always liked dogs. In my growing-up years, a succession of dogs populated the house. Later, when I grew up and had a house of my own, there were dogs there too. Invariably, these were pure-bred Indian mongrels, usually picked up from the streets. When the first chapters were written, there were three pet dogs. Sunday and Peppy have now gone off to dog heaven. Byte is still around. And then there was Scruffy, who is dead too. She was not quite a pet. She was a happy stray, fed occasionally and looked after when she had a litter, before she was eventually taken to a vet and sterilized. At the time when the first chapters were written, Scruffy’s latest litter of six balls of fur were also in the house, inside a basket that kept toppling over as they tried to climb out. By the time the last chapters were written, there were more strays that were half-pets, and more puppies—two unnamed mothers, twelve pups and three male dogs—with Bori and Bhuri (now three months old) spending the occasional night on our bed.

  With so many dogs that came and went, you have to be interested in dogs. The dog versus cat debate is a pointless one. I don’t mind cats, but I must confess I prefer dogs. The pedigreed versus Indian mongrel debate is also largely pointless. But I must also confess I prefer mongrels. There is no reason for others to have similar preferences and there are people who do not like dogs, pedigreed or otherwise. But are these individual preferences or are there some community-level preferences determined by social cum religious norms that have evolved over thousands of years? Islam’s disapproval of dogs is known. How about Hinduism? Unlike the west, where an Englishman and his dog never seem to be parted, such as in depictions of Chaucer’s tales, a dog never seems to have a companion status in India. Indeed, the impression I had, before undertaking the ‘research’ that went into this book, was stronger. I had the feeling that dogs were looked down upon in Hinduism. The incident from the Mahabharata, about the dog accompanying the Pandavas on their final journey, does not count. That was not a real dog, was it? It was Dharma disguised as a dog. Sure, there were accounts of holy men adopting dogs, but in general, dogs were looked down upon. At least, that was the impression I had and I have more than an average degree of familiarity with Hindu texts.

  Imagine my surprise when I re-read the Rg Veda and discovered that dogs were used as herd dogs, hunting dogs and watchdogs, not to forget their being used as beasts of burden. I had not known that. When I had read the Rg Veda earlier, the fact had not registered. That was the trigger. And as I re-read Hindu texts with this canine perspective in mind, I continually stumbled upon facts that I had not known. A figurine from Harappa shows a dog wearing a collar. Another figurine from Mohenjodaro shows a fighting dog. The prehistoric cave paintings in Bhimbhetka (circa 5000 BCE) show a man with a dog on a leash. India exported dogs to Alexander the Great and the Persian kings. The Valmiki Ramayana mentions dogs being bred in palaces and sent as gifts to Ayodhya. Sita’s earrings were shaped like the teeth of a dog. In the Mahabharata, when Arjuna prays to Durga, the goddess is described as possessing the face of a dog. There are several Bhairava temples that not only show Bhairava surrounded by dogs, but also riding on them. In Delhi itself, there is a Bhairava temple with statues of dogs that are worshipped. There is a Raja Ravi Verma painting with the four vedas represented as dogs. The more I read, the more I marvelled. A more complicated proposition, bolstered with evidence from Bengali literature, began to emerge as the central thesis of this book. And since there were not any books on attitudes to dogs in Hinduism, these facts clearly deserved wider dissemination. The research not only involved extensive reading, it took me to all kinds of places in search of Bhairava temples and to Bhimbhetka. The book wrote itself. It was a voyage of discovery and will probably be one to the reader as well.

  In the process, my attitude towards dogs has also changed a bit. Bhairava temples are often around cremation grounds, or what used to be cremation grounds earlier. And as you will discover when you read this book, there is an intimate association between dogs and cremation grounds, and between dogs and the afterlife. Bizarre and strange though it might seem, dogs take us a bit closer to the afterworld. Spend some time at a cremation ground (not the electric variety) and life seems transient and temporary, as indeed it is. It is dark. The embers on some pyre have died down. There are a million stars in the sky. And you are completely alone. Did I say completely alone? Not quite. There will be some dog by your side. Not a dog you have adopted, but one that has adopted you.

  On more mundane matters, this is a book I enjoyed writing. And it is one I think you will like reading.

  On less mundane matters, every book results in the accumulation of debts. First, there are my sons, Nihshanka and Vidroha, whose interest in dogs also spilled over into the progress of the ‘dog book’. Second, Dr Ranesh Chakraborty, 80-plus and India’s youngest ever medical doctor, retired cancer specialist, philatelist and Sushruta-specialist, interested in everything under the sun—to him I owe a collection of ‘dog stamps’, most of which have not been used in this book. Third, friends like Latha Jishnu, Shankkar Aiyar, Pranjal Sharma, Anil Bharadwaj, Seetha Parthasarathy and Laveesh Bhandari, who parted with tit-bits of information, with the occasional snide comment about whether the next book was going to be on cats. Fourth, V.K. Karthika and R. Sivapriya of Penguin—Karthika began what Sivapriya brought to completion, and without either, the book would not have happened. Fifth, modern-day Sarama, Suparna Banerjee—without her interest and support bordering on inspiration, a book that had been languishing for a couple of years would never have been finally completed. Her enthusiasm in tracking down the Bhimbhetka cave paintings or the Heliodorus column in Vidisha or Bhairava temples or cremation grounds has been greater than mine, and also her interest in dogs. When we got out for walks in the evenings, it is quite a sight to see her followed by a motley crowd of at least a dozen stray dogs and puppies on an average, Bori and Bhuri the present favourites and Laawaris the least liked. Thank you, everyone.

  Bibek Debroy

  New Delhi

  March 2008

  {1}

  Introduction and Tradition

  Dogs have been with humans for a very long time. The modern dog can be traced b
ack to the Creodont, down through the Miacis, the Cynodictus, the Cynodesmus and finally the Tomarctus (15 million years ago). Tomarctus resembled a modern dog and evolved into the Canidae family, which includes the dog, the wolf and the jackal. That evolution took place around one million years ago. Tomarctus’ importance was primarily behavioural, because it was a social animal and these social instincts of belonging to a pack or a family and of having a leader or being a leader (the alpha male phenomenon) remains in the modern dog.

  We do not quite know when the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) emerged from the wolf (Canis lupus). Some genetic research suggests this might have happened 135,000 years ago. Different types of wolves probably led to different dog families. Nor do we know how the dog evolved from the wolf, with the two species sharing a lot of genetic material in common. Fossil remains that go back 500,000 years find wolves and Neanderthals sharing close quarters. Presumably, wolves hung around human habitations, often as scavengers. Wolf puppies were adopted and even selectively bred—not as pets, but because they performed a useful role in guarding, herding, hunting and even for transport. But a tame wolf is not the same as a domestic dog. Dogs are a distinct species. The tails curl upwards, the fur is softer, legs are shorter, eyes are larger and the brain case is also larger. Not to forget that dogs are unusual in that they bark. There are more similarities with a foetal wolf than with a wolf that has actually been born. It is almost as if the dog is a species where the complete stage of wolf development has been cut off before actual completion.

  In 1947, the Reader’s Digest published a condensation of George Stewart’s autobiography of man.1

  Then, too, I sometimes found a lost puppy in the forest—a roly-poly and trusting bit of fur which wiggled on its fat stomach and looked up with big eyes. I lowered the raised axe and brought him to the camp. He played with the children for a while. When he grew his fangs, a wilder light began to glow in his eyes and he slipped off to join the grey circling ones at the edge of the firelight. But such a wolf was never quite the same. He crept closer to the camp-fire than the others, and remembered the children who had patted him. As centuries slipped by, those grey shapes in the twilight began to pay me back many times over for the poor leavings I threw them. Their sudden outcry in the night let me know that tigers were prowling close. They would follow my hunting band in order to eat the leavings of my kill. When they were following and I ran foul of a she-bear, they snapped at her heels and turned her and let me get an arrow into her flank. Finally the pack joined in my hunt; being natural hunters, they learned when to crouch silent, when to follow by scent, and when to leap forward in full cry on the track of the wounded stag. It is a strange part of my story, hardly to be imagined, if it had not really happened. Thus by mutual give and take we grew together, although it was probably more by slow coming closer of the band and the pack than by the taming of pets.

  Dogs and humans evolved in parallel, and the domesticated dog perhaps goes back to around 15,000 BCE, if not 20,000 BCE. There are hypotheses that drag this time line of domestication back even further, to the Neanderthal rather than Cro-Magnon period. And this domestication must have been true even of India. After all, the Dhole (Cuon alpinus) famous from Kipling’s Jungle Books, has been around for thousands of years. Dholes cannot, of course, be tamed. In the Mowgli stories, there is an entire episode on the Dhole or the red dog of the ‘Dekkan’. Although lesser known, Norah Burke’s jungle stories also describe packs of wild dogs, with a government reward for killing wild dogs. ‘They are of a reddish colour, with darker tails, black at the tip, and very much resemble the village dogs—to which they are only distantly related. They never attack human beings, and are said never to pursue domestic animals. They cannot be kept and tamed.’2 Prehistoric cave paintings from Spain, dated to 15,000 years ago, show dog-like animals accompanying humans on hunts. A prehistoric cave painting from Bhimbhetka clearly shows a man leading a dog, in what looks like a fairly modern leash. But fossil remains of humans and dogs together do not generally go back to before 10,000 BCE. Remains of domesticated dogs have been found in Azerbaijan, radiocarbon dated to between 5500 and 5000 BCE. In Ashkelon (Israel), burial grounds for dogs have been found, dating to between 500 and 332 BCE. Dog skeletons have been found in Celtic graves. Dog burials have been found in Mesopotamia, with dog figurines and pendants with dogs drawn on them. These may have been associated with dog sacrifices.

  Since there are more genetic types of dogs in Asia than in Europe, Africa or America, it has been argued that dogs may have had an Asian origin. Some recent DNA-based research suggests that wolves evolved in India (and not North America as is commonly believed) and that Indian dogs did not evolve from wolves.3 That is, Indian wolves are not genetically related to the dog and dogs must have evolved from wolves elsewhere in the world and then migrated to India with humans. ‘Our results suggest that the “Bhutia”, “Tawang”, Tibetan Mastiff and local “pariah” dog breeds were brought into the Himalayas and peninsular India by humans … It seems likely that South Asia is not the region of origin for the domestic dog.’4

  Whether we should call them breeds in the modern sense is unclear, but there were many different types of dogs in ancient Egypt, chiefly of the hunting type. Dogs were already being buried, almost in the way humans were buried, in pre-dynastic Egypt. The greyhound type (Pharaoh, Saluki, Ibizan, Basenji, Afghan) is depicted in many tombs, sculpture and pottery. Indeed, one can argue that the Saluki (the word saluki means noble) is the oldest known dog breed and that the Egyptians were the first dog breeders. The ancient Egyptians worshipped Anubis (or Anpu) as the god of death. It was the responsibility of Anubis to shepherd the souls of the dead to their final judgement, where their hearts were weighed against the feather of truth. He was the judge and lord of the after-life. Anubis has a human body. But he has a head that is usually identified as the head of a jackal, but sometimes also as the head of a dog. Indeed, Socrates referred to Anubis as ‘Dog of Egypt’. Hardai was the sacred city of Anubis, and the Romans referred to Hardai as Cynopolis or city of dogs. Numerous dog cemeteries have been found in Hardai. Even Egyptian gods like Wepwawet, Set and Osiris have been identified with dogs. The Egyptian goddess Isis, Aset or Eset is the goddess of Sirius or Sothis.5 She was often depicted riding a dog. Herodotus tells us about the respect for cats and dogs in Egypt. ‘If a cat dies in a private house by a natural death, all the inmates of the house shave their eyebrows; on the death of a dog they shave the head and the whole of the body. The cats on their decease are taken to the city of Bubastis, where they are embalmed, after which they are buried in certain sacred repositories. The dogs are interred in the cities to which they belong, also in sacred burial places.’ So wrote Herodotus.6 But this may have been exaggeration. Compared to the number of mummified cats, there are not that many mummified dogs. But Egyptian records also tell us that dogs were held in such esteem that harming a dog was a punishable offence.

  It was not just hound-type dogs, the Egyptians also possessed mastiff-type dogs and this was also true of the entire region, Babylon and Assyria. Stone carvings show these mastiffs being used in hunting and in war.7 Anubis can probably be traced to the Sumerian goddess Bau. She had the head of a dog and was the goddess of healing, puppy burials having been found in her temples. Cynotherapy may owe its origin to Bau’s role as goddess of physicians. Subsequently, the Sumerians had the goddess Inanna (Asherah), who assimilated many of Bau’s attributes. Inanna’s husband was Dumuzi. While Inanna had seven hunting dogs, Dumuzi had black royal dogs. In the Old Testament, the priests of Inanna (Asherah) and Dumuzi (Tammuz) are called dogs. In subsequent religions of Babylon and Assyria, the king of the gods was Bel-Merodach and had four dogs, named Seizer, Eater, Grasper and Holder.

  In Persia, folklore and religious rituals extensively involve dogs. The word for dog, sag, is derived from seh-yak, meaning one-third, because one-third of the dog’s essence is supposed to be human. Dogs were supposedly created to protect human possessions against
wolves. In legends, many heroes (Cyrus the Great, Afrasiab, Bokhtonnasr (Nebucadnezzar)) are reported to have been nursed by bitches. In pre-Islamic times, Persians used dogs for hunting, herding and also for war. A dog belonging to Darius III (336–30 BCE) reportedly refused to leave the dead boy after Darius III was killed by Bessus. Not only did the god Mithras have hunting dogs, dogs were also sacred to Mithras. Black dogs figured in magic rituals. One of the volumes of the Zend Avesta is on the care and breeding of dogs. Noah (or Nuh) is supposed to have received his name because he expressed disgust at a dog. On being scolded by God, he began to lament, the word nuh meaning mourning. In Islamic Persian myths, when Adam and Eve were thrown out of heaven, Satan persuaded other beasts to attack them. From Satan’s spittle, God fashioned two dogs, the male to protect Adam and the female to protect Eve. In another version, God created the dog from clay left over after Adam had been created. According to another legend, when Adam was thrown out of heaven, God gave him Moses’ staff as protection. Adam used the staff to hit a dog. But God asked Adam to be a friend to the dog instead and that is how the dog was domesticated. In a final myth, the taboo on eating dog meat is really a taboo against cannibalism, because humans are reborn as dogs. However, the taboo is often about eating the flesh of all carnivores, as opposed to permitted eating of the flesh of herbivores.

  Among ancient civilizations, one should not forget China either. There are written records from China that go back to around 2000 BCE, mentioning dog trainers and masters of kennels. Dog remains have been found in several royal burial chambers. Almost certainly, miniature dog breeds were first developed in China. These toy dogs were carried inside the sleeves of gowns and were useful because they provided warmth. Large dogs were used to guard sheep. And perhaps dogs used for hunting in packs were also first bred in China. The Chow Chow was a hunter, the Shar Pei was a fighter, and dogs were also eaten. Marco Polo reported Kublai Khan possessing 10,000 hunting hounds and 10,000 attendants to look after these hounds. As in Persia, dogs played a role in religious rituals, apart from chows chows being used as guards of temples. The ‘Fu Dog’, which brings happiness and good fortune, is a recurrent theme. The Tibetan Terrier was also a bringer of good luck. Especially during the Han Dynasty (3 BCE onwards), there are depictions of dogs in pottery and dogs had royal status. There was symbolism in some of this pottery, the symbolism being that of favourite dogs being buried with their masters. Many years before Kublai Khan, the Emperor Ling Ti (156–189 CE) decreed that his dogs had royal status and some of the palace dogs obtained titles like imperial guards and viceroys. They had wet nurses to suckle them, an allowance was provided for their upkeep and these royal dogs were guarded by eunuchs. Many years later, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi in Japan followed in the footsteps of Emperor Ling. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi (1646–1709) was the fifth shogun of Japan and was known as the ‘Dog Shogun’ because of his obsession with dogs. He became shogun in 1680. He was born in the Year of the Dog and a Buddhist monk told him that he had been a dog in his earlier life. Consequently, he decreed that anyone who harmed a dog would receive the death penalty. He insisted that dogs should be addressed in honorific terms. And 50,000 dogs were maintained at government expense, fed on a selected diet of rice and dried fish. This is, however, not as extreme as Saur or Suening, a dog that was the king of Norway for three years in the 11th century CE. The Norwegian king Eystein (1004–1123) was angry that his subjects had deposed him. Therefore, when he was back on the throne, he made the dog the king for three years and Suening signed royal decrees with his paw-prints. Pliny also reported that the Ethiopians had a dog as a king.