Devdutt Pattanaik's latest book Jaya (published by Penguin; Rs 499) is a retelling of the Mahabharata, in which he weaves plots from the Sanskrit classic and its many folk and regional variants.
Devdutt Pattanaik's latest book Jaya (published by Penguin; Rs 499) is a retelling of the Mahabharata, in which he weaves plots from the Sanskrit classic and its many folk and regional variants. The book comes packed with 250 line drawings. In this last column in a 5-part series, he talks about the position that the horse holds in religious India.
Horses are are worshipped in India. In every village, there is a guardian god who rides a white horse. For example, there is Khandoba in Maharashtra, Mallana in Andhra Pradesh, Ramdev Pir in Rajasthan. In Tamil Nadu, gigantic terracotta horses are offered to hero gods like Aiyanar. 
There is a horse-riding avatar of Vishnu known as Kalki. The son of the sun-god is called Revanta and he is visualised as riding a horse; he is god of the chase.The gods churned the flying horse Ucchaishrava from an ocean of milk. In Vedic times, a major sacrifice was called the horse-sacrifice or the Ashwamedha.
Horse-headed beings are associated with Vedic wisdom. Surya takes the head of a horse to explain the truth to Yajnavalkya, while Rishi Dadichi takes the head of the horse to transmit ritual secrets to the Ashwini twins. Vishnu's horse-headed form, Hayagriva, is also associated with wisdom.
And yet, funnily enough, the horse is not a native animal of India. It has had to be imported from Central Asia through the North West frontier. Perhaps the popularity of the horse and its veneration is the result of high demand and low supply.
The kingdoms of Madra and Kaikeya, located in modern-day Pakistan, were famous for horses. Even today, the most famous Indian breed, the Marwari, is bred in the North Western arid state of Rajasthan.In the Mahabharata, when the Pandavas are forced into hiding after their cousins attempt to kill them by giving them a palace of lac and then burning it down, the Pandavas encounter a Gandharva called Angaraparna who offers the Pandavas several horses as gifts. This restores the confidence of the Pandavas as they attempt to rebuild their life.
The Mahabharata also tells the story of how sages went to kings asking for horses. The tuition fee quoted by Vishwamitra is a thousand white horses, each with just one black ear. The student, Galava, has to go from king to king, including Yayati, to procure these horses.One wonders what kind of horses they were. Images of horse-riding warriors and gods come to us from medieval times, following the arrival of Greeks, Hun and Muslim warlords. Before that, in classical Vedic times, the gods travelled only in chariots drawn by many horses.
Perhaps the early horses were too weak to carry human weight, too weak to pull a chariot alone. Arjuna's chariot is pulled by four white horses.The description of the chariots makes them seem less like Roman chariots and more like carts, that gave archers a vantage position in the battlefield. Only Kshatriyas or warriors were allowed to ride a chariot and the charioteers, the Sutas, though servants, were given pride of place in the social structure.
The basic military battalion described in the Mahabharata is the Akshouhini comprising of elephants, chariots, foot soldiers and infantry in the ratio of 1:1:5:3. Thus, there were both warriors who rode on chariots and warriors who rode horseback. But the latter are totally ignored in the story.
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Perhaps in these times, the warriors who rode horses did not have saddles and so, were not as powerful as the later infantry men. Or they had not yet mastered the art of using weapons while fighting and therefore only served to protect the chariot-riding warrior, who was the most important in the battlefield, even more important than the elephant-riding warrior.
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Devdutt Pattanaik is a Mumbai-based mythologist who makes sacred stories, symbols and rituals relevant to modern times. Reach him at devdutt@devdutt.com
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