gions, Hinduism spread most successfully where there was a large-scale migra-
tion and cultural influx into a previously unorganized tribal area, setting off
emulative formation of subcastes along lines of ritual purity. In the latter
respect, Hinduism is similar to Judaism after the destruction of its temple began
its period of depoliticization and diaspora. The rabbi is something like the
Indian pandit: both were laymen and householders, with little or no organiza-
tion around church property, salaries, and hierarchy. Religious leadership
merged with the lay status system, giving a special charisma to the possession
of education. Both diaspora Judaism and pandit-centered Hinduism empha-
sized ritual purity, thereby structuring group barriers through commensualism
and marriage. Hinduism is a more extreme version of the organizational forms
of diaspora Judaism. The Hindu diaspora over the multiethnic Indian subcon-
tinent occurred in circumstances of weak and ephemeral states, where no rival
religion predominated, whereas Judaism survived under Roman, Persian, and
Islamic states in the niches for conquered peoples allowed by the state-allied
religions. Hinduism is what Judaism might have become if fragmented political
conditions had left all the other circum-Mediterranean ethnic groups to com-
pete with and emulate Jewish ritual purity.
The great Hindu epics which crystallized the identity of Hinduism as a
popular culture began the reinterpretation of previous Indian traditions. These
texts, which arrived at canonical status around 400 or 500 c.e., are exercises
in anachronism (Van Buitenen, 1973: xxi–xxxix). The name Mahabharata
extols the territory of “great Bharata” (i.e., the Punjab, the ancestral Vedic
homeland in the northwest), while its action is set in the period of the original
Aryan migration into the lower Ganges. The Ramayana contains a mythical
version of the colonization of Sri Lanka, which had been carried out by settlers
escaping the cage of the centralized Ganges states around 500–200 b.c.e. Both
epics are a kind of anti-Buddhist propaganda, depicting Hindu conquest of
territories—Bihar and Sri Lanka—which at the time of writing were the main
Buddhist strongholds.^31 The period in which the bulk of these epics was
written, ca. 200 b.c.e.–200 c.e., coincides with the outpouring of Mahayana
sutras, as well as with a Buddhist epic by the poet Ashvaghosha, written as if
in rivalry with the new fame of the Hindu poems (ca. 80 c.e.; Nakamura,
1980: 133–35). Hindu and Buddhist texts now began to make extravagant
claims for the antiquity of their cultures, the Buddhists by inventing cosmic
incarnations of the Buddha who lived in prior eons; this feature was imitated
by the Jainas, who list a series of 24 Tirthankaras (exalted founders) prior to
Mahavira, some going back millions of years. Now sets in the contest of “more
ancient than thou,” which displaced the prestige of doctrinal innovations found
among the Upanishadic sages and in early Buddhism, and which henceforward
distorted Indians’ conceptions of their own history.212 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths