The Development of Hindu Iconography c10.2

c10.2

It has been said in the preceding chapter that the later sections of the Vedic literature distinctly indicate remarkable changes being introduced in the religious outlook of the Indo-Aryans. It is true that they did not relinquish the practices which were performed with so much zest by their forefathers, but there cannot be the least doubt that all these were having more re-orientation due to various factors that were in operation from the very beginning of the period when they first set their feet on Indian soil. The most important among these was undoubtedly the close contact which they had to come in with the previous inhabitants of India. However much they could revile the children of the Indian soil whom they were driving from the more covetable lands into the hills and jungles, with such deprecatory epithets as *dāsas*, *anāsas* (noseless ones), *yātus* or *yātudhānas*, *rākṣasas*, *śiśnadevas*, *mūradevas*, etc., it cannot be denied that some of these latter people possessed a sort of material culture which was much superior to that of their victors. It is a pity that we have not before us any literary record of what these people were like, what they believed and practised, what they thought of their conquerors, presented from their point of view; but the remains that have been unearthed in course of systematic excavations in the Indus Valley have brought to light immense evidence regarding the high and developed state of material civilisation with which their forefathers were endowed. The commingling of cultures of the immigrants and the former inhabitants was greatly responsible for the gradual introduction of various elements which are either not traceable, or traceable only in faint outlines, in the earlier literary works of the Indo-Aryans. The *Ṛgveda*, or the other Vedas and the early Brāhmaṇas, had practically nothing to say on such topics as the law of *Karma*, the transmigration of souls and their necessary concomitant, the somewhat pessimistic view of life; but these were gradually being more and more discussed in the different Upaniṣads. The wholesale pessimism of the Buddhists might not have been the characteristic of the latter, but there is little doubt that the genius of the Upaniṣads wholly differs from that of the *Ṛgveda*, however many ties may bind the two periods. Again, the pantheism of the former can very well be contrasted with the belief in the multifarious nature-gods of the Aryans as portrayed in the latter. All these new elements can be presumed to have grown in the Indian soil, in the inception of which the earlier settlers in India did not play a mean part. Keith has very cautiously presented the problem in this way: "The Upaniṣads, as in some degree all earlier thought in India, represent the outcome of the reflections of a people whose blood was mixed. We may, if we desire, call the Upaniṣads the product of Aryo-Dravidian thought; but if we do so, we must remember that the effect of the intermixture must be regarded in the light of chemical fusion, in which both elements are transformed."¹