The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c16.s1.25

c16.s1.25

Now turning to the problem of genealogies, we find a tendency to inflate the chronology and accept the longer lists ignoring the basic weaknesses of the texts themselves. We have already pointed out the anachronisms in time, as well as space, of our Puranic accounts. Hence this has resulted in a jumbling of dynastic lists on some doubtful synchronisms. Pargiter, the pioneer of Puranic studies in India, first collated all the available texts and compiled the genealogies on the basis of five major synchronisms. But his computation suffers from the fact that he ignored the geographic background of Aryan expansion in India and distributed his dynasties all over Northern India. Secondly, he depended on the Ikshvaku lists which are supposed to be complete and on the basis of his synchronisms, he spaced out the names at his disposal in an arbitrary way. Thus he established the existence of 95 generations of rulers before the Mahabharata war, beginning with the traditional Manu. Thirdly, there is a conflict between the Vedic and Puranic writers on some of the names of rulers. Thus whenever there was some doubt, ancestral names and family names were repeated, making the relation still more difficult to find out. The possibility of collateral lines being treated in a genealogical order has to be taken into consideration. Bhargava¹ and Pargiter² discussed atlength the difference between the Ramayana text on the one hand, and the Puranic texts on the other. While the former contains only 35 names before Rama, the later make it 63. But Pargiter dismisses Ramayana and says that "it is very improbable that the Ramayana alone should be right."³ Inspite of the fact that it omits to mention a number of well-known names, it is worth while re-examining, in view of the equally well-known fact, that the king lists of the Puranas are blindly copied from the earlier text. Secondly, a short chronology is our manifest need, and we need not be carried away by the prejudices of Pargiter against the so-called Brahmanical sources. It is again a textual problem.