Book name: Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History

Author: By Wendy Doniger,

Publisher, price: Speaking Tiger, Rs 699\

Whether we ride horses or think about them, equestrian metaphors are part of our everyday language. ‘Trojan horse’ viruses are a perpetual threat to our computers, we hope that we will prove to be a ‘dark horse’ to unappreciative employers, and, as every writer hopes, the editor has given me free rein for this review. Wendy Doniger’s Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares is a tour de force (tour de horse?) that examines the centrality of horses within the longue durée of Indian civilization. Horses were not native to India, coming with successive groups of people who moved into the subcontinent for trade, migration, and conquest; yet they became crucial to Indian religious and political imaginations. Thus, the mythology as well as the practical knowledge that developed around them, from the Vedic period onwards, depicted the horse as a paradoxical creature: useful but exotic, good but dangerous, domesticated yet always capable of running wild.

Doniger hits the trail by sketching a common mythological culture surrounding horses in the Indo-European world, striding through the Vedas, Upanishads, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Puranas, as well as Buddhist texts, the shastric tradition, the Sultanate and the Mughal periods, and into the British empire and the postcolonial period. The book is simultaneously chronological and non-linear: horse-myths, embedded into the psyche and environment of South Asia, have had astonishing afterlives. Forcibly moving into greener pastures when necessary, horses (and their owners) have been uniquely capable of colonizing the spatial imagination: “the Sanskrit word amhas (constraint) –– from which comes our ‘anxiety’ and the German Angst –– expressed the terror of being fenced in or trapped.” The horse, with its “natural imperialism,” symbolized power and status. The violent Vedic ritual of horse sacrifice was a way for ancient kings to tap into the animal’s power and virility. Moreover, as the stallion came to represent male aspiration, the mare represented its opposite. Doniger tells us the foundational Vedic myth of Saranyu, an immortal woman who took the form of a mare and was raped by the mortal Sun who took the form of a stallion. Saranyu abandons the offspring of this union (the centaur-like Ashvins) and the mare comes to be associated with the evil Vedic mother, guilty of abandonment.

The gendered split between the contrasting imaginaires of stallion and mare is explored in subsequent chapters, as are the connections between horses and fire, snakes, rivers, the ocean, and the underworld. What begins in the Vedas finds fuller expression in later works, changing with political, religious, and moral regimes. The chapter, “Horses in the Ocean...”, describes how an older connection between horses and the ocean — first seen in the Rig Veda, Ucchaihshravas of the Mahabharata, and the myth of Sagara in the Ramayana — comes into its own in the Puranic world (400-1400 CE), especially with the consolidation of the image of the mythical underwater mare with fire in her mouth. Dangerous horses are contrasted with compassionate ones. In “Buddhist Horses”, we come across both the man-eating, horse-headed femme fatale Yakkhis, who devoured and ate men, as well as Buddha’s own horse, Kanthaka, the embodiment of devoted service and compassion. Much like Kanthaka is Zuljenah, the great horse of the Karbala myth, who features in the chapter, “Arabian Horses and Muslim Horsemen”.

The earlier prejudice and misogyny that went into the characterization of mares in the Sanskrit corpus was challenged in medieval Indian horselore. Doniger argues that Arabs, Turks and Mongols rode mares because they viewed them as more loyal and intelligent (and quieter) than stallions. Thus, several vernacular equestrian epics boasting heroes, such as Pabuji, Devnarayan, Desinghu/Teja and Gugga, focus on the (black) magic mare as opposed to the white stallion. This shift, Doniger suggests, reflects the favouring of an “imported Arabic pro-mare tradition” against an anti-mare Vedic and Puranic bias. Within the British empire, horses had to be bred for the cavalry, and the British encountered several problems on that front, especially in finding suitable breeding grounds. Books by William Moorcroft and John Lockwood Kipling showed the entangled histories of colonial knowledge production (and categories such as ‘caste’ and ‘race’) and the classification and breeding of horses. In Doniger’s book, scientific classification and enumeration predated the colonial project. The science of horses occurred in texts such as the Arthashastra, Agni Purana, and Shalihotra’s Ashvashastra, which was translated into Persian between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Unlike earlier Sanskrit texts, the Persian texts displayed “a greater interest in the peculiarities of real horses.”

Throughout, Doniger reminds us how old horse myths are still anthropologically alive. They are celebrated in stories, cults, and rituals that bear witness to the great intermingling of people in the Indian subcontinent. One example is the equestrian god, Khandoba, of Maharashtra, celebrated by Hindus and Muslims alike. These stories also provide insights into the development of varna. The Mahabharata was narrated by Sutas, men who were both bards and charioteers. The Sutas were descended from the illegal intermarriage between Brahmins and Kshatriyas and, because of their connections to horses, were an excluded caste. The great tragic hero, Karna, himself was a Suta, taunted by other nobles. Krishna, during the Kurukshetra war, became Arjuna’s Suta, and so the ambivalence of Sutas reflects a formative moment in the history of caste. Horses remained an important element of caste struggle in subsequent centuries. In “Horse Myths and Rituals...”, Doniger cites how horse-owning Dalits (trading leather with the Portuguese in exchange for horses) were killed by the upper-castes in the seventeenth century. Upper-caste anger at Dalits riding horses resulted in a lynching as recently as 2018 in Gujarat.

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares, written with Doniger’s signature wit and erudition, stands at a peculiar intersection among commodity and environmental history and cultural history. A delightful read, the book offers deep insights into how the equine has stood in for human aspirations, desires, and frailties for millennia. IDecoding the Pegasus puzzlet is no surprise that Doniger herself has been a keen rider. In a section titled, “Equine Lexicology and More Equine Lexicology,” she returns to her younger self in 1978 who, frustrated with Monier-Williams for inadequately translating horsey Sanskrit to horsey English, published a gloss of obscure Sanskrit equine terms in the Journal of the American Oriental Society. Over forty years later, this book hits the home stretch.