JB: Historiography of Brahmanism 1

Johannes Bronkhorst
Université de Lausanne
[email protected]

The historiography of Brahmanism*

(published: History and Religion: Narrating a Religious Past, ed. Bernd-Christian Otto -
Susanne Rau & Jörg Rüpke, Berlin – Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2015, pp. 27-44)

1. Brahmanism is the term I use to refer to a movement that arose out of

Vedic religion. Vedic religion was what the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann
(2003) might call a primary religion. It was a priestly religion, not unlike the
priestly religions of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. As such it was indissociably
linked to one single culture, to one single society, and to one single language. It
had a close association with the rulers of the society to which it belonged, for
whom it provided ritual services. Like other primary religions, Vedic religion had
no exclusive truth claims of a religious nature, and did not try to make converts.
Like other primary religions, it depended for its survival on the continued
existence of the society to which it belonged.
The society to which it belonged did not continue to exist. Beginning in
the fourth century BCE northern India became unified into an empire, or rather a
sequence of two empires, the first one under the Nanda dynasty, the second under
the Mauryas. The centre of these two empires lay outside the realm of traditional
Vedic religion. Its rulers did not therefore continue the Vedic traditional
sacrificial cult. The degree of centralization, especially of the Maurya empire,
though weak by modern standards, was high enough to discontinue traditional
rulership in the Vedic heartland. This meant the end of traditional support for
Vedic religion. Without regular and systematic support from the rulers, the Vedic
ritual tradition was threatened. Vedic religion, if it wanted to survive at all, had to
reinvent itself.
Vedic religion did reinvent itself, and the result is what I call Brahmanism
(or ‘the new Brahmanism’, to distinguish it from the preceding Vedic period).
Brahmins, i.e., the successors (and, at least in theory, descendants) of the Vedic

*
I thank Vincent Eltschinger for valuable feedback.

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priests, now offered their services to new customers, also outside their traditional
heartland. Some of these services were continuations of the elaborate rituals they
had performed in the good old days, but the demand for these expensive sacrifices
was now limited. New services were however added. These included other uses
of the Brahmins’ supernatural powers, such as predicting the future through
reading the stars and bodily signs. Ritual services related to major transitions in
the lives of individuals (birth, death, weddings, etc.) were on offer, too. Brahmins
also developed a vision of society, how it should be, and how it should be run,
and offered counselling services to rulers.
We know that Brahmanism, this reinvented form of Vedic religion,
became extraordinarily successful, and that without the help of an empire,
military expansion, or even religious missionary activity. Brahmanical notions
spread from a rather limited area during the last centuries preceding the Common
Era and ended up, less than a thousand years later, imposing themselves all over
the Indian subcontinent and in much of Southeast Asia. One factor that may have
played a major role in this remarkable expansion is the spreading conviction
among rulers that they could not risk to rule their kingdom without the
supernatural and practical advice that Brahmins could provide.
Brahmanism was much concerned with the image it projected of itself. Its
representatives, the Brahmins, had to live exemplary lives, especially in terms of
ritual purity, which became a major issue. This affected almost all aspects of a
Brahmin’s life, and included purity of descent: with few, precisely specified
exceptions, the only way to become a Brahmin is through birth from parents who
are both pure Brahmins.
There is another aspect of the self-projected image of Brahmanism, and
this one has a direct bearing on the theme of this volume. Brahmanism projected
an image of its history that is, in its basic outline, extremely simple. Brahmanism,
in this image, has always been there and does not change. Indeed, it made this
claim with regard to the world, but also with regard to the corpus of texts it
preserved, the Veda, and its sacred language, Sanskrit: they had all been there
since beginningless time. There is therefore no such thing as a founder of
Brahmanism, and indeed, the historical reconstruction of Brahmanism I just

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presented, of its reinvention as a response to political changes that had taken

place in northern India, all this has no place in the manner Brahmanism visualized
its own past. Brahmanism had always been there, and had neither been reinvented
nor otherwise adapted to changing circumstances.
This particular vision of the past found its perhaps most striking
expression in the school of Vedic interpretation, Mīmāṃsā, that may be regarded
as close to the most orthodox, and orthoprax, form of brahmanical culture. The
Vedic corpus of texts, I had occasion to observe, was looked upon as
beginningless, and therefore authorless. Brahmanical students learnt to recite a
portion of this literature from a teacher, who had learnt it from his teacher, who in
his turn had learnt it from an earlier teacher, and so on without beginning. No one
had composed this literature or any of its parts, and this conviction was the basis
of an intricate interpretative strategy. The fact that the Veda had no author, for
example, implied that it was pure word, not soiled by human (or divine)
interference, and therefore necessarily faultless. Faults can occur in verbal
communication, but analysis shows that such faults result from the speaker’s
shortcomings: speakers may wish to mislead their interlocutors, or may not be
properly informed about the situation they talk about. In the case of the Veda,
there is no author who may wish to mislead, or who may not be properly
informed; no faults therefore attach to the Veda. Numerous further consequences
were drawn from the presumed authorlessness of the Veda, and a complicated
technique of analysis was based on it for which the Mīmāṃsā remained famous
until today.
The beginninglessness of the Veda had another consequence. The Veda
could not possibly refer to any historical event. It could not do so, because it
existed already before the historical event concerned took place. Passages that
seem to describe or refer to historical events had to be reinterpreted in such a
manner that they no longer do so.
Anonymity and absence of historical events was in this manner anchored
in the Veda, the corpus of texts indissociably associated with Brahmanism. It is
possible — and Sheldon Pollock (1989) has actually argued — that the
impersonal and non-referential nature of Mīmāṃsā (remember that the Veda has

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no author) is partly responsible for the impersonal and non-referential nature of

most of Sanskrit literature.1 However, this is not the whole story, far from it.

2. Two things happened that had a profound effect on the vision of history of
at least some Brahmins. On one hand a series of historical events during the
centuries surrounding the beginning of the Common Era forced them to rethink
their position.2 This new challenge was combined with a new historical scheme
that came to be adopted in Brahmanism during this same period.
A series of catastrophes befell Brahmanism during the final centuries
preceding the Common Era. After the collapse of the Mauryan empire, around
185 BCE, the north of India suffered a succession of foreign invasions. The Indo-
Greeks were among the first to extend their power on the ruins of the Mauryan
empire. Indo-Scythian (or Śaka, to use the Indian term) invasions followed soon.
The result was a breakdown of society. For the Brahmins this was felt to be a
breakdown of the brahmanical order of society. A number of texts give
expression to the brahmanical disarray during this period. The most important
from among these is the so-called Yuga Purāṇa,3 which describes the events in
the form of a prophecy. It does so in great detail, and in this respect it is quite
unique in early India (Parasher 1991, 239). It mentions the Greeks (yavana) and

1
Cf. Pollock 1989, 610: ‘When the dominant hermeneutic of the Vedas eliminated the
possibility of historical referentiality, any text seeking recognition of its truth claims —
any text seeking to participate in brahmanical discourse at all — was required to exclude
precisely this referential sphere. Discursive texts that came to be composed under the
sign of the Veda eliminated historical referentiality and with it all possibility of
historiography.’ Perrett (1999, 314-315) criticizes this view.
2
Strictly speaking I do not, of course, know whether the same Brahmins who initially
believed in the eternality of the world then adopted a different scheme. Different (groups
of) Brahmins may have held, or adopted, different positions. Or the new scheme was
added onto the old one: series of Yugas succeed each other for ever from beginningless
time. Eltschinger informs me that the Yogācārabhūmi refers twice to Brahmins that are
kaliyugika. This suggests that a sub-group of Brahmins may be at stake. A passage in the
late Siddhāntamuktāvalī (which is to be dated between 1550 and 1650 CE, depending on
whether one accepts Kṛṣṇadāsa Sārvabhauma or Viśvanātha Nyāyasiddhānta Pañcānana
as its author) still confronts a critic who does not believe in the creation and destruction
of the world; in response it points out that the destruction of the world has been taught in
the Scriptures (Wada 1995: 123-124: na ca pralaya eva nāstīti kutaḥ sargādir iti vācyam,
pralayasyāgameṣu pratipādyatvāt).
3
The Yuga Purāṇa is really part of a longer work called Gārgīya-jyotiṣa (and other
names; see Mitchiner 2002, 1 f.). Another part of this work is studied in Kenneth G.
Zysk’s forthcoming Physiognomy in the Gārgīyajyotiṣa.

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the Śakas and the war and destruction these invaders bring. Most interesting from
our present perspective is that it views these disasters as indicators of the
approaching end of an era, of a Yuga. The Yuga Purāṇa elaborates this notion by
distinguishing between four Yugas that succeed each other, each succeeding one
being worse than the one that precedes.4 The invasions of the Greeks and the
Śakas take place at, and signify, the end of the last of these four Yugas, the Kali-
Yuga. The text concludes with an indication that a new series of four Yugas will
begin soon.5
It seems clear from this text that its author really believed that the end of
the Kali-Yuga was at hand (Mitchiner 2002, 86; González-Reimann 2002, 98-99;
2009, 417). He thought it would take place soon after the invasions of the Śakas,
and this is indeed the time when the text must have been composed.6 Other
accounts of the impending end of time have been preserved, as portions of larger
texts. The Mahābhārata, for example, contains a prophecy about the end of the
Kali-Yuga, in the form of a discussion between King Yudhiṣṭhira and the sage

4
The idea that there is a beginning and a violent end to our world fits in with what Witzel
(2012) calls Laurasian mythology; even the notion of the Four Ages is Laurasian
according to him (p. 86 ff.). The idea of an eternal world, without beginning and without
end, does not find a place in Laurasian mythology, and looks more like an intellectual
construct.
5
This circumstance allows us to use the expression ‘millenarianism’ here (see Thapar
2000). Note however that Christian millennialism ‘describes the hope for a final “Golden
Age” to come before the end’ (McGinn 2002, 136; my emphasis). The term
‘millenarianism’ can no longer be appropriately applied to the classical Purāṇic vision of
history, which we will consider below.
6
Second half of the first century BCE, according to Mitchiner (2002, 93). Interestingly,
the Vikrama era, which begins ‘in the autumn of year 58/57 or in spring 57/56 BCE’, is
called kṛta in early inscriptions; its first inscriptional occurrence dates from 239 CE (D.
R. Bhandarkar in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum vol. III, revised edition, pp. 187 ff.;
Falk 2012, 131). Kṛta is, of course, also the name of the first of the four Yugas, and
therefore of the beginning of a new cycle. Is this coincidence? Indian tradition links this
era to a King Vikramāditya who presumably was victorious over the Śakas in that year
(Mitchiner 2002, 81 f.; González-Reimann 2002, 99; Witzel 2003, 95-96; Kulke,
Rothermund 1998, 72 f.). Understandably, already Bhandarkar (ibid., pp. 197-198)
considered the possibility that the Kṛta era might have been thought of as the new Kṛta-
Yuga.
Sharma (1982, 202-203 n. 79; 2001, 62 n. 97), with a reference to Dhruva 1930,
states: ‘It is argued that the Kali description of the Yuga Purāṇa belongs to c. 50 BC but
the Purana seems to have been a work of the third century AD.’ Dhruva himself,
however, dates the text ‘to the beginnings of the first century B.C., that is to say, to the
first or the second decade thereof’ (1930, 45).

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Mārkaṇḍeya.7 It adds to the list of oppressive ruling dynasties, and one of these
(the Ābhīras) appears to justify the conclusion that this prophecy was written, or
given its present shape, in 250 CE or later (Mitchiner 2002, 46).
This concrete prophecy may be a late addition of the Mahābhārata, but
clearly earlier portions were very much aware of the notion of the end of the
Yuga,8 for the yugānta is frequently invoked in comparisons (as shown in
González-Reimann 2002, 64-73). These comparisons give us a clear image of
how the end of the Yuga was thought of: ‘It is a time of great destruction, caused
mainly by natural forces: torrential rains, implied by the rolling clouds and the
thunder; earthquakes, hinted at by the shaking produced by Arjuna’s conch as
well as by the fallen guardians of the quarters; terrible winds …; and an intense,
resplendent Sun; but most of all fire, an all-consuming fire that destroys
everything. There are also comets or meteors, as well as negative planetary
configurations. … In the Epic … this destruction is often associated with the god
Rudra (Śiva), who … is said to rage at yugānta.’ (González-Reimann 2002, 71).
The chronological position of the Mahābhārata, perhaps roughly
contemporaneous with the Yuga Purāṇa, to which later additions were made at
least until the prophecy of Mārkaṇḍeya, strongly suggests that these comparisons
with the end of the Yuga were not mere innocent poetic metaphors. They rather
compared events in the Mahābhārata with horrors that might arrive to the
composers of the text in a not too distant future.
It is therefore hardly surprising that that the Mahābhārata contains, in the
so-called Āpaddharma-section of its twelfth book, advice for kings as to how to
deal with the difficulties accompanying the end of the Yuga. Yudhiṣṭhira here
asks:9

7
Mhbh 3.186-189. Here, and only here, the Mahābhārata directly describes the end of
the Kali-Yuga (using the expression yugānta; everywhere else this expression is used in
comparisons); González-Reimann 2010, 69; 2002, 64 ff.
8
‘This destruction at yugānta, which clearly does not refer to the transition between one
individual yuga and the next, seems to allude either to an undefined long period of time,
or to the end of the cycle of all four yugas (Kṛta, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali) taken as a
whole. The four yugas taken together are commonly referred to as a yuga, what the
Purāṇas would call the mahāyuga, the great yuga, or the caturyuga, the fourfold yuga.’
González-Reimann 2002, 71-72.
9
Mhbh 12.138.1; tr. Bowles 2007, 264. Cp. Fitzgerald 2004, 529 ff.

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When dharma and the world are in decline in consequence of the yuga
coming to an end (yugakṣayāt), and when bandits oppress them [dharma
and loka], grandfather, how can one stand firm?

Clearly, the then following advice is meant to be practical advice. This is only
possible if the end of the Yuga was considered near enough to justify receiving
advice about it. We now know that this is exactly what the author of this passage
may have believed.
The approaching end of time may also find expression in the lists of royal
dynasties that have been preserved in a number of Purāṇas (Pargiter 1913). These
lists end in the early years of the Gupta dynasty, and describe in this connection
the evils of the end of the Kali age (Pargiter 1913, 56 (kaliśeṣe); tr. p. 74; Rocher
1986, 116). However, the continuing rule of this same dynasty may have
convinced brahmanical authors that time was not yet coming to an end.10
The brahmanical sources we have so far considered create the impression
that the Yugas they talk about, or at any rate the last one, the Kali-Yuga, were
thought of in manageable historical terms. Indeed, the Mānava Dharmaśāstra
(Manu 1.68-70) gives the four succeeding Yugas a length of respectively 4’000,
3’000, 2’000 and 1’000 (human) years.11 The Kali-Yuga, according to later
Purāṇas, began at the moment of Kṛṣṇa’s death, i.e. soon after the Mahābhārata
war (González-Reimann 2002, 51; further Thapar 1996, 29; Kane 1973, 896 ff.).
As we have seen, it was expected to come to an end soon after the invasions by
Greeks and Śakas according to the Yuga Purāṇa, some centuries later according
to other, younger, sources.

10
So Kulke 1979, 106: ‘Es war m. E. dieser Widerspruch zwischen dem alten, zyklischen
Weltbild sich stets verschlechternder Zeiten und dem ‘linearen’ Verlauf der ruhmreichen
Geschichte der frühen Gupta-Kaiser, der zum Abbruch der frühen Königsgenealogien
führte.’
11
To each of these Yugas a preceding and following twilight must be added, so that it all
adds up to 12’000 human years, equal to one single Yuga of the gods (Manu 1.71).

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3. Events did not quite follow expectations.12 One reaction, it appears, was to
move the end of the Kali-Yuga forward, while yet holding on to the view that this
end was near. When the end did still not come, and when presumably the
succession of foreign invasions and other catastrophes had come to an end, an
altogether different appreciation of the situation gained the upper hand. Rather
than thinking that the end of the Kali-Yuga was very near, brahmanical authors
now came to think that this Yuga would extend far into the future. This change of
perception was based on a number of reflections, among them the following.
Time spans were no longer thought of in terms of human years, but rather in
terms of divine days, or years, which lasted very much longer than their human
equivalents. This made it possible to think of the end of the Kali-Yuga as being
far away. The expectation of a speedy transition to a happier Yuga revealed itself
in this manner premature.13
If this understanding of the early brahmanical texts on Yugas is correct,
the notion of the Kali-Yuga, when it was first introduced into Brahmanism, had a
very concrete historical sense. It had immediate relevance for the present, because
the present was thought of as being the end of the Kali-Yuga, an observation that
explained the political and social disasters of the time. It was concrete enough to
be testable, to use an anachronistic term, and it turned out to be incorrect: the
world did not come to an end during the first centuries of the Common Era. The
length of the Kali-Yuga was therefore reconsidered, with the result that

12
Fussman (2012, 26) observes: ‘The first century A.D. was a time of great turmoil and
changes in Northern India. Wars raged between the last Indo-Greeks, the Śakas, the Indo-
Parthians and the Kushans till Wima Kadphises, c. A.D. 50, was able to bring some
peace. There may have been later local revolts or internal strifes, of which no evidence
remains, and the rule of the Kushans may have been hard, but at least foreign invasions
were stopped for more than two centuries.’ We must assume that Kuṣāṇa rule did not
quite correspond to Brahmancial expectations of the new Kṛta-Yuga.
13
Note that the question of linearity and circularity of time plays no role in the
observations here made. Both the ‘short’ and the subsequent ‘long’ Yuga were part of a
cyclic vision of time, but the very length of the ‘long’ Yuga made it more linear than the
‘short’ Yuga: ‘Where cyclic time takes a spiral form, it can be seen as almost linear when
sufficiently stretched’ (Thapar 2011, 292). Yet ‘historical awareness’ played a far greater
role when people believed in the ‘short’ Yuga. Strictly speaking, “the Indians did not
believe in ‘cyclic time’, if by that is meant an endless and beginningless recurrence of
events. It is true that the narratives recounted in the Purāṇas allude to vast cosmic cycles
of repeated creation and dissolution (the kalpas), but these are cycles of change within
linear time.” (Perrett 1999, 314).

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henceforth Brahmins lived no longer near the end of the Kali-Yuga, far from it:
hundreds of thousands of years were to pass before its end would arrive. Disasters
and mishaps could no longer be attributed to the end of the Kali-Yuga; instead
they were attributed to the Kali-Yuga as such. A short but intense period of
catastrophic events that announced the arrival of better times was in this way
replaced with a very long period of hundreds of thousands of years characterized
by misery and injustice throughout. Texts no longer speak of the end of the Kali-
Yuga, but of the Kali-Yuga tout court.14 General conditions, including most
notably social conditions, will go from bad to worse, to be sure. But this process
of deterioration is nowhere near its end.

4. If our reflections so far are correct, a major change took place in the
brahmanical conception of history. The earlier conception finds expression in
some of the texts considered so far, while the so-called Purāṇas are our main
testimony for the updated version. However, the Purāṇas also contain traces of
the transition.
Consider the following observations about the presentation of the Yugas in
these texts, made by Ludo Rocher in his book The Purāṇas (1986, 124):

One feature that sets the yugas apart from similar systems in other
civilizations is that, in India, the world ages have been assigned specific
durations. The four yugas extend over periods of 4000, 3000, 2000, and
1000 years. Each of these is preceded by a dawn (saṃdhyā) and followed
by a twilight (saṃdhyāṃśa) equal to one tenth of the duration of the yuga
proper. The figures for the yugas which appear most often in the purāṇas
are, therefore, 4800, 3600, 2400, and 1200, the caturyuga being equal to
12,000 years. More often than not these years are said to be divine years.
To convert them into human years they have to be multiplied by 360, i.e.
1,728,000 + 1,296,000 + 864,000 + 432,000 = 4,320,000.

Note the words ‘more often than not’ in ‘More often than not these years are said
to be divine years’. Some Purāṇas say no such thing. An example is the Vāyu
Purāṇa (see esp. 32.58-65), presumably one of the earliest surviving texts of this

14
See the example of the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, below.

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kind.15 This Purāṇa contains a vivid description of the hardships connected with
the end of the Kali-Yuga in chapter 58. This description culminates in the
introduction of a destructive ruler called Pramiti who kills countless human
beings (primarily foreigners (mleccha)); following this, people start killing each
other, and suffer untold miseries. Then, however, the Yuga changes overnight
(ahorātraṃ … yugaṃ … parivartate, 58.101), and a new Kṛta-Yuga comes about
(kṛtam avartata, 58.102; pravṛtte … kṛtayuge, 58.103). An almost identical
account is found in Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa 1.2.31. Nothing prevents us from
assuming that these two Purāṇas preserve an understanding of the Yugas that
prevailed before their lengths were multiplied by 360, i.e. before their lengths
exceeded anything measurable in terms related to ordinary human experience.16
Vincent Eltschinger (2012) has drawn attention to the fact that the
apocalyptic passages from the Vāyu and Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇas just considered say
nothing about foreign invasions, and all the more about heretical views17 as
harbingers of the end of the Yuga. It seems fair to explain this in chronological
terms. These passages date from a time when Gupta rule had put an end to foreign
invasions, and the main threat facing Brahmanism was felt to come from non-
brahmanical religious currents including Buddhism and Jainism.18
An example of a Purāṇa that represents the more recent position, in which
the Yugas are thought of as being of exceedingly long duration, is the Viṣṇu
Purāṇa.19 Significantly, Viṣṇu Purāṇa 6.1, which repeatedly refers to the Kali age,
and a few times to the increase or progress of the Kali age (kaler vṛddhi), never
refers to its end (cp. Kirfel 1959, 11 ff.). This confirms our earlier impression that
now the Kali-Yuga as such, and not its end, preoccupied the minds of the authors
concerned. The brahmanical worries of the Kali-Yuga in the Viṣṇu Purāṇa

15
Rocher 1986, 245. Hazra (1940, 16) proposes 200-275 for the portion on Yugas.
16
Note that the Yugas are, also in the Vāyu Purāṇa, placed in a wider context of
Manvantaras and Kalpas, periods of far greater length than the individual Yugas.
17
The terms ‘heretic’ and ‘heretical’ are far from ideal in this context. For a discussion,
see Doniger O’Flaherty 1983.
18
The suggestion has been made that the story of Pramiti was a reflection of historical
rulers ‘such as Candragupta II Vikramāditya (r. 375-415) or Yaśodharman of Malvā,
who defeated the Hūṇas around 530’ (Eltschinger, 2012: 55, with references to further
literature).
19
Viṣṇu Purāṇa 1.3.11 and 6.1.5 state in so many words that 12’000 divine years
constitute a caturyuga.

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concern, as once again pointed out by Eltschinger, heretical competitors rather

than foreign invaders.20

5. Let me sum up what we have seen so far. Brahmanical identity was, most
of the time, not so much connected with a historical narrative in which significant
events took place. The main characteristic of brahmanical historical narrative was
rather that, when it really came to it, nothing of fundamental importance
happened in the present.21 This could take the form that the world had essentially
always been as it is today, since beginningless time. Alternatively, it could take
the rather pessimistic shape that we live in a time of great depravity that will go
on for hundreds of thousands of years to come. Both these views — that of
beginningless and endless time, and that of enormously long world periods —
were in the end variants of the idea that the world at bottom does not change, or
changes so slowly that we cannot notice it; the two do not even exclude each

20
Eltschinger (2012) points out that the brahmanical Yugas did end up finding their way
into certain buddhist texts. A particularly interesting example is the tenth chapter
(sagāthaka) of the Laṅkāvatārasūtra, which must have been added to the text between its
first translation into Chinese in 443 and the second one in 513. Unfortunately the
information about Yugas is full of contradictions: there are no Buddhas in the Kali-Yuga
(v. 804); Śākyamuni lived in the Kali-Yuga (v. 794); long after Śākyamuni, the Kali-
Yuga will begin (v. 784-786); Buddhism will disappear at the end of the Kali-Yuga (v.
786). V. 786 informs us that the Kali-Yuga will come after the Mauryas, the Nandas, the
Guptas and then some unspecified foreigners (mleccha), i.e., presumably at the time these
verses were added to the text. If that was the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, one wonders
what would be its end. The text provides no answer.
21
Contrast this with the Christian West: ‘The impact of the Bible on Christian
conceptions of history, from the earliest Christian centuries to the nineteenth, was radical
and pervasive. It was not only that the sin of Adam, the Incarnation and the Last
Judgement framed all history. The fact that biblical history presented the dealings of God
with his Chosen People in something like a recurrent pattern of transgression,
punishment and deliverance meant that the same pattern could be expected to be repeated
so long as history lasted: history presented a recurring series of types and situations
within the historical macrocosm of primal sin and final judgement. … But above all the
Bible offered an archetypal pattern, repeated many times, of covenant with God and
entry to the Promised Land, of collective transgression and its punishment by
devastation, exile, captivity, followed by deliverance and return, symbolized by the
rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple. It is a pattern, it may be noted, which makes
human beings the prime movers of history only through their transgressions:
transgression is their role in the historical dynamic, though there is a subsidiary one for
the instruments of punishment, whether tyrants or barbarians, and for the individual
bringers of deliverance — types of Moses and the Massiah.’ (Burrow 2007, 182-183).

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JB: Historiography of Brahmanism 12

other. Events occurring at present are therefore without deeper significance.22

However, we have also seen that there was a time, during the turbulent centuries
surrounding the beginning of the Common Era, when at least a number of
Brahmins did attribute deeper significance to the distressful events that were
taking place.23 They thought that the end of the Kali-Yuga was near, and that a
new Kṛta-Yuga might begin soon.24 If we agree with Pollock (1989, 605) that, for
an event to become historical, it must be seen to contribute to the development of
a plot, we cannot but conclude that the events of that time were historical in the
strictest sense. They were interpreted as signs of the approaching end of a world
period, more precisely: as playing a role in bringing about the end of the Kali-
Yuga. This period, during which current political and social events were seen, not
as more of the same but rather as of profound and unique significance, did not last
very long.25 Indeed, the urgency of the approaching end appears to have
weakened, with the result that less and less attention was paid to the precise
events that supposedly announced it. An altogether static vision of history soon
came to predominate again.
It has been observed that ‘we can read thousands of pages of Sanskrit on
any imaginable subject and not encounter a single passing reference to a historical
person, place, or event — or at least to any that, historically speaking, matters’

22
Cp. Kane 1973, 923: ‘Since only 5046 years have elapsed (in 1945 A.D.) from the
beginning of the Kali age and as Kaliyuga extends to 432000 years according to Paurāṇic
computations we are just on the threshold of the Kaliyuga and it is beyond one’s
comprehension to visualize what will happen towards the end of the vast period of about
427000 years that are still to pass before Kaliyuga ends. It is very small consolation to
read in the Purāṇas in a prophetic strain that at the end of that colossal period Viṣṇu will
be incarnated as Kalkin in a villa Śambhala, will destroy all Mlecchas, śūdra kings and
heretics and will establish dharma, so that the Kṛta age will then be ushered in.’
23
This period coincides rather closely with the one during which the character of
classical Brahmanism was formed through the composition of Dharmasūtras, the
introduction of the sacrificial cord (yajñopavīta) and of the notion of dvija ‘twice-born’ to
refer to the upper three varṇas and especially to Brahmins; see Olivelle 2012.
24
The examples we have considered show that Kane’s (1973, 886) remark to the extent
that ‘all works that are extant think that they are in the midst of a very sinful age and
there is not a single work which thinks that the era of perfection may dawn in the very
near future’ is not correct.
25
One reason why this period has so often been overlooked in modern scholarship may
well be that scholars, struck by what they considered the non-historical attitude of
Brahmanism, concluded that India did not and could not have history. Madeleine
Biardeau may count as a prime example; see Colas 2012.

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(Pollock 1989, 606). We have come across an important exception to this

observation. The early texts that testify to the then reigning belief that the end of
the Kali-Yuga was near refer extensively to historical persons, places and events.
The Yuga Purāṇa, mentioned earlier, is the best example. We had occasion to
mention the incursions by Indo-Greeks and Śakas, related in this text. It also
mentions a number of contemporary rulers, whose existence is to at least some
extent confirmed by other sources of information.26 These persons and events
were mentioned because they played a role in bringing the Kali-Yuga to a close.
Subsequent Sanskrit literature does not normally refer to historical persons
and events, even where it complains about the sufferings brought about by the
Kali-Yuga. At first sight this is remarkable. Why, for example, are there so few
references to the Hūṇas and other invading armies that brought endless misery in
their wake in the middle of the first millennium?27 The answer suggested by our
reflections so far is as follows. These other invaders played no crucial role in
bringing about the end of a Yuga, as the Indo-Greeks and the Śakas had. The
sufferings inflicted by these more recent invaders were perhaps not less severe
than the earlier ones, but they were, historically speaking, unremarkable, part of a
process that would repeat itself numerous times before the present Kali-Yuga will
come to an end. Let me quote John Burrow’s (2007, 474) observation as to what
is a story: ‘A story is inherently whiggish, and the longer its timescale the more
marked this will be, requiring an artificial protagonist enduring beyond the span
of individual lives and therefore, generally, of individual purposes. A story is
selective, looking forward to its later episodes or its eventual outcome for its
criteria of relevance.’ Well, the events that these more recent brahmanical authors
experienced, unlike those experienced by their predecessors around the beginning
of the Common Era, were no longer part of a story, they were no longer relevant
to anything in particular. Rather than dwelling upon their specific misfortunes,

26
See Mitchiner 2002, 55 ff.: ‘The historicity of the account’.
27
It is likely that the unspecified foreigners of Laṅkāvatārasūtra 10.786 (see note 19,
above) were Hūṇas. According to Verardi (2011, 156-157), ‘The destructions brought to
India by the Hūṇas, described at length in a number of books of Indian history, are
nothing else than the devastations inflicted on Indian adversaries by increasingly
confident Brahmans who recruited anyone on whom they could exercise their influence.’
This, if true, would give the Brahmins little to complain about.

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many brahmanical authors — and most specifically the authors of the Purāṇas —
turned their attention to the competitors that were there to stay: various heretics
disrespectful of the proper order of society, among them Buddhists and Jainas
(see González-Reimann 2002, 170; Eltschinger 2012).
It now becomes understandable that brahmanical authors from the time of
the Gupta empire onward have a tendency to identify their rulers with (what we
would consider) mythical heroes. Hermann Kulke (1979, 106 ff.) draws attention
to the Gupta emperor Samudragupta, who in Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa repeats
many of the heroic feats of the mythical Rāma. The deeds of King Harṣa,
according to Bāṇa’s Harṣacarita, correspond to deeds of the mythical Kṛta-Yuga.
Sandhyākaranandin wrote his biography of King Rāmapāla of the Pāla-dynasty,
the Rāmacarita, in such a way that it can also be read as a description of the deeds
of the mythical Rāma. The Pṛthvīrājavijaya of Jayānaka is a further example, for
the poet here systematically identifies King Pṛthvīrāja with Rāma (Pollock 1993,
274 ff.). The feats of those mythical heroes had been relevant and meaningful,
they were part of a coherent story, and in this sense they were historical. The
frequent identifications of rulers with gods must no doubt be understood in the
same manner (see Veluthat 2009, 70 f.).
Brahmanism was a second time confronted with a situation that threatened
its very foundations, and it will be interesting to consider how it responded that
second time. Roughly from the twelfth century onward, invaders from Central
Asia instituted a new social and political order that had no place for the
brahmanical order. This time, as Sheldon Pollock (1993) has argued, the
brahmanical reaction did not invoke an approaching end of the world. Quite on
the contrary, this new threat came to be interpreted as a repetition, or imitation, of
the war between good and evil depicted in the Rāmāyaṇa. More than before,
‘good’ kings came to be identified, in inscriptions and literature, with the divine
king Rāma, and the invading Turkic peoples were designated ‘demons’ (rākṣasa,
asura).
Pollock’s important observation confirms the main picture drawn in this
article. The first series of catastrophic events had been interpreted in the
brahmanical tradition as indicative of the approaching end of the world. The

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JB: Historiography of Brahmanism 15

second series was interpreted altogether differently: as an imitation of what had

happened before. In a way, Brahmanism in the second millennium was no longer
in a position to introduce an end-of-the-world scenario, because it had settled for
an over-all picture of history that would continue for a long time. This was
apparently not yet the case at the beginning of the Common Era.

6. We should be careful not to deny brahmanical India a sense of history, as

has so often been done. A number of texts, including Sanskrit texts, and
numerous inscriptions, show that awareness of what happened in earlier
generations was not lacking in India.28 However, our reflections suggest that
ordinary historical events were not significant in a deeper sense for brahmanical
thinkers, most of the time.29 The exception that proves the rule is the relatively
short interval in brahmanical history when Brahmins believed that the end of the
world (i.e. the end of the Kali-Yuga) was near, so that political and social events
gained a uniqueness which they did not habitually have.
During most of the time following (and presumably preceding) this
relatively short interval, ordinary historical events — including big, perturbing
events, such as wars and conquests — were at best more or less close imitations
of events that had occurred before, and would occur again in the future. Rulers, it
seems, liked to compare their own feats to feats carried out by legendary or
mythological figures that lived an indeterminate number of years ago. These
ordinary historical events had no deeper significance, they did not contribute to
the development of a plot whose importance went beyond the actors directly
involved. Events of world-wide significance had taken place in the remote past,
and would take place in an equally remote future. They were duly remembered,
or anticipated, and are all of the kind we would call mythological or religious. In
between these world-shaking events, much happened, but nothing that could

28
See, e.g., Kulke 1979; Thapar 2011; further the various contributions in Religions of
South Asia vol. 5 no. 1-2 (2011), an issue dedicated to ‘Genealogy and history in South
Asia’.
29
In this connection it is relevant to recall the difference between history and record-
keeping; see Burrow 2007, 1-8 (‘Prologue’); also p. 231: ‘History as a genre …
characteristically involves extended narrative, relevant circumstantial detail, and
thematic coherence; the recording of facts is dictated by thematic, dramatic and
explanatory considerations, rather than just chronological juxtaposition and convention.’

24.12.2015
JB: Historiography of Brahmanism 16

compare in significance to those events long past, or hidden in the distant future.
Brahmins knew what counted in this world. During the centuries surrounding the
beginning of the Common Era they thought that the events they lived through
counted on a cosmic scale. They gradually found out that they had been mistaken,
and that the events that really matter did not take place right now: they had taken
place in a remote past, or would take place in an equally remote future.

7. Vincent Eltschinger, in an article already referred to (2012), draws

attention to a ‘sudden transposition of mutual rivalry to the philosophical level’
that took place in or at the end of the fifth century, and that finds expression in
new polemical treatises that oppose brahmanical and buddhist thinkers.
Eltschinger is tempted to link this development with the prominence heretical
thinkers gain in the Purāṇas from Gupta times onward. Piotr Balcerowicz (2008,
57-59), too, notices a sudden change in jaina philosophical texts, presumably in
the fifth century. Like their brahmanical and buddhist counterparts, jaina texts
become polemical and argumentative at that time. Something seems to have
happened in or around the fifth century that had this profound effect on
philosophical writing. Could the brahmanical transition — from the expectation
of an approaching end of the world followed by ‘redemption’ for those who
remained pure, to the conviction that present circumstances would continue for
countless years — have played a role?
It is difficult to answer this question with confidence. If our reflections so
far are correct, millenarian expectations continued until well after the beginning
of Gupta rule, even though they appear to gradually loose much of their fervour,
and stop attributing eschatological significance to each and every event. Also
under the Guptas, it seems, the extended vision of the Kali-Yuga began to replace
those millenarian expectations. An increased hostility toward heretics is already
manifest in the last texts associated with the short Kali-Yuga, and therefore with
millenarian expectations: (the relevant portions of) the Vāyu and Brahmāṇḍa
Purāṇas. The temporal correspondence between abandoned millenarian
expectations and anti-heretical polemical activity is not therefore perfect. This
does not mean that the two are unconnected. I would rather favour the idea that

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they are connected. It is easier to ignore one’s intellectual (and political)

opponents if one is convinced that history itself will soon judge in one’s favour:
in the new Kṛta-Yuga there is clearly no place for heretics of various hues. Once
this conviction weakens or disappears, on the other hand, one is on one’s own;
history will then no longer solve your problems for you. Finding oneself in the
wicked Kali-Yuga, and this for a long long time to come, one has to take matters
in one’s own hands. This is perhaps what brahmanical philosophers did, for
example by writing polemical treatises and engaging in inimical debates.

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Abbreviation:

Mhbh Mahābhārata, crit. ed. V.S. Sukthankar u.a., Poona 1933-66

(Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona)

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