“Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History” by Wendy Doniger
Birth of the Celestial Twins, detail of Mughal watercolor, ca 1585-1590 (LAMCA)
Traveling in rural Bengal in 1963, the 23 year-old Wendy Doniger spied the bas-relief of a horse carved into a simple mud and thatch hut. “Resembling the T’ang horses at a gallop … in style something like Picasso bulls, [it was] altogether one of most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The Bengali villagers did not own horses, and seldom ever saw them. Her insight contrasting the profusion of Indian horse imagery with the animal’s actual rarity in India germinated, 58 years later, into Doniger’s latest book, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares.
The historical and cultural importance of the animal—highly prized for its rarity—is indeed in inverse proportion to its numbers in India.The status of the horse in India has been described by many authors, going back to Marco Polo, Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling’s father), and most recently Yashaswini Chandra. The monsoon-dominated weather, the lack of wide pastures and the mineral-poor soils combine to make it difficult to graze horses freely in large numbers. India’s neighbors in Afghanistan and Iran, from the Kushans to Nader Shah, could invade and conquer India with droves of bigger, faster and better trained horses. To defend themselves against invasion, Indian rulers had to import horses from drier climates and raise them in stables, feeding them on costly delicacies to make up for the lack of grass. Unlike the steppe horses living in a semi-wild state, the stabled Indian horse was like a pampered, yet willful child. This made the horse a vehicle and symbol for power, for divinity, for beauty, an inaccessible object of desire.
Why are the mares wicked?
Traveling in rural Bengal in 1963, the 23 year-old Wendy Doniger spied the bas-relief of a horse carved into a simple mud and thatch hut. “Resembling the T’ang horses at a gallop … in style something like Picasso bulls, [it was] altogether one of most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The Bengali villagers did not own horses, and seldom ever saw them. Her insight contrasting the profusion of Indian horse imagery with the animal’s actual rarity in India germinated, 58 years later, into Doniger’s latest book, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares.
The historical and cultural importance of the animal—highly prized for its rarity—is indeed in inverse proportion to its numbers in India.The status of the horse in India has been described by many authors, going back to Marco Polo, Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling’s father), and most recently Yashaswini Chandra. The monsoon-dominated weather, the lack of wide pastures and the mineral-poor soils combine to make it difficult to graze horses freely in large numbers. India’s neighbors in Afghanistan and Iran, from the Kushans to Nader Shah, could invade and conquer India with droves of bigger, faster and better trained horses. To defend themselves against invasion, Indian rulers had to import horses from drier climates and raise them in stables, feeding them on costly delicacies to make up for the lack of grass. Unlike the steppe horses living in a semi-wild state, the stabled Indian horse was like a pampered, yet willful child. This made the horse a vehicle and symbol for power, for divinity, for beauty, an inaccessible object of desire.
Why are the mares wicked?
Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History, Wendy Doniger (University of Virginia Press, April 2021)
Doniger’s ride through four millennia of Indian legend and folklore is full of sacrificial horses, horse-headed gods, transformations and couplings. These horses emerged, wingèd, from the primordial churning of the sea. They pulled the chariot of the sun. They give birth to the heavenly twins, the Ashvins, India’s Dioscuri. The protagonists of the great Sanskrit epics and the historic Buddha all rode heroic horses. Closer to modern times, horses featured prominently in Brothers Grimm-like folk tales with a dazzling magical variety and echoes of more ancient practices like the Vedic horse sacrifice.
Doniger seeks to make sense of this rich legacy of equine myths with her combination of Sanskrit erudition and equestrian experiences. Why are the mares wicked? Doniger suggests that as horses raised in stables are deprived of their natural social environment, the mares in particular wind up responding badly to the advances of the stallion, often biting and kicking, sometimes fatally, their suitors. I note, in contrast, that in Turco-Mongol folk tales such poor behavior on the part of their steppe-raised horses is unknown. Doniger, as in her previous writings, retains her knack for poking fun at the phallocracy, showing that her sympathy clearly lies with the wicked, put upon mares.
Her study suggests that animal sexuality deeply permeated pre-modern society. Living side-by-side with animals, such societies inevitably developed religious traditions and folklore heavily-colored by the love and fear such animals inspired. Some of the stories recounted here make for heavy going, with bodily fluids liberally splashing about. If Hindu mythology often seems messy and inordinately concerned with sex, it is only when compared to the sanitized version of Greek mythology that most of us learned in school via the prim Ms Edith Hamilton. The original Greek episodes, peeping out of the ancient texts, show a similar preoccupation with equine sexual symbolism. What is striking about India, as opposed to Greece, is how their equine-inspired myths have lasted into early modern times, reflecting the political and military importance of horses down to 1800.
Stallions symbolize “good” male power. Mares stand for “bad” female desire. Since any work by Doniger comes with a strong point of view concerning gender, it presents a puzzle to her, and a challenge to the book’s title, when the heroic stallions of the great Sanskrit epics are replaced in the 17th century Rajput ballads with dutiful mares. Her tentative explanation that this reflects an influx of Arab mares does not stand up, because the Arabs did not export mares to India in any number (as Marco Polo himself noted). It may simply reflect the fact that the brigands of Rajasthan preferred the quiet mares for raiding and plunder. The Mughals rode stallions into battle and fought on horseback. The Rajputs rode to battle but dismounted to fight.
There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past.
Readers familiar with the literature on horses in India, or indeed elephants (eg, Thomas Trautman’s Elephants and Kings, Chicago University Press, 2015), will find few new historical insights in this book. On the other hand, Doniger uses her deep equestrian experience to probe both historical sources and legends. She claims that foreigners’ complaints that Indian fed their horses ghee (clarified butter) or lamb biryani are groundless calumnies. She asserts that most of the advice given in Sanskrit equestrian manuals, so decried by the British colonialists, must have been good, otherwise the Mughals, who knew a thing or two about horses, would not have so assiduously translated them into Persian. Legends about people eaten by horses or killed by their bites, she writes, are transmitted by people unfamiliar with horses. Getting bit by a horse’s blunt teeth is no worse than getting your fingers caught in a door! The back of a horse is where the danger lies.
Reviewers of Doniger’s many previous works have remarked on their erudition but also their similarity to American shaggy dog stories (which go on and on). Doniger excused herself once by saying that the book in question was not meant to be so long “but it got the bit between its teeth, and ran away from me”. Readers will sometimes feel this way about this book as well. There’s no horse that cannot be ridden, and no rider that can’t be thrown, writes Doniger. There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past, and no interpretation that doesn’t fall a little flat at the end. Readers will enjoy the long ride even if they experience a few falls and kicks.
Doniger’s ride through four millennia of Indian legend and folklore is full of sacrificial horses, horse-headed gods, transformations and couplings. These horses emerged, wingèd, from the primordial churning of the sea. They pulled the chariot of the sun. They give birth to the heavenly twins, the Ashvins, India’s Dioscuri. The protagonists of the great Sanskrit epics and the historic Buddha all rode heroic horses. Closer to modern times, horses featured prominently in Brothers Grimm-like folk tales with a dazzling magical variety and echoes of more ancient practices like the Vedic horse sacrifice.
Doniger seeks to make sense of this rich legacy of equine myths with her combination of Sanskrit erudition and equestrian experiences. Why are the mares wicked? Doniger suggests that as horses raised in stables are deprived of their natural social environment, the mares in particular wind up responding badly to the advances of the stallion, often biting and kicking, sometimes fatally, their suitors. I note, in contrast, that in Turco-Mongol folk tales such poor behavior on the part of their steppe-raised horses is unknown. Doniger, as in her previous writings, retains her knack for poking fun at the phallocracy, showing that her sympathy clearly lies with the wicked, put upon mares.
Her study suggests that animal sexuality deeply permeated pre-modern society. Living side-by-side with animals, such societies inevitably developed religious traditions and folklore heavily-colored by the love and fear such animals inspired. Some of the stories recounted here make for heavy going, with bodily fluids liberally splashing about. If Hindu mythology often seems messy and inordinately concerned with sex, it is only when compared to the sanitized version of Greek mythology that most of us learned in school via the prim Ms Edith Hamilton. The original Greek episodes, peeping out of the ancient texts, show a similar preoccupation with equine sexual symbolism. What is striking about India, as opposed to Greece, is how their equine-inspired myths have lasted into early modern times, reflecting the political and military importance of horses down to 1800.
Stallions symbolize “good” male power. Mares stand for “bad” female desire. Since any work by Doniger comes with a strong point of view concerning gender, it presents a puzzle to her, and a challenge to the book’s title, when the heroic stallions of the great Sanskrit epics are replaced in the 17th century Rajput ballads with dutiful mares. Her tentative explanation that this reflects an influx of Arab mares does not stand up, because the Arabs did not export mares to India in any number (as Marco Polo himself noted). It may simply reflect the fact that the brigands of Rajasthan preferred the quiet mares for raiding and plunder. The Mughals rode stallions into battle and fought on horseback. The Rajputs rode to battle but dismounted to fight.
There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past.
Readers familiar with the literature on horses in India, or indeed elephants (eg, Thomas Trautman’s Elephants and Kings, Chicago University Press, 2015), will find few new historical insights in this book. On the other hand, Doniger uses her deep equestrian experience to probe both historical sources and legends. She claims that foreigners’ complaints that Indian fed their horses ghee (clarified butter) or lamb biryani are groundless calumnies. She asserts that most of the advice given in Sanskrit equestrian manuals, so decried by the British colonialists, must have been good, otherwise the Mughals, who knew a thing or two about horses, would not have so assiduously translated them into Persian. Legends about people eaten by horses or killed by their bites, she writes, are transmitted by people unfamiliar with horses. Getting bit by a horse’s blunt teeth is no worse than getting your fingers caught in a door! The back of a horse is where the danger lies.
Reviewers of Doniger’s many previous works have remarked on their erudition but also their similarity to American shaggy dog stories (which go on and on). Doniger excused herself once by saying that the book in question was not meant to be so long “but it got the bit between its teeth, and ran away from me”. Readers will sometimes feel this way about this book as well. There’s no horse that cannot be ridden, and no rider that can’t be thrown, writes Doniger. There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past, and no interpretation that doesn’t fall a little flat at the end. Readers will enjoy the long ride even if they experience a few falls and kicks.
David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.
David Chaffetz 11 August 2021 Non-Fiction
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