A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s3.81

v1.c5.s3.81

To sum up therefore, it is permissible to hold that the inferences deducible from the data hitherto collected by the Ethnographical Survey regarding the origin of the Marāthās, both of the upper and lower classes, find some corroboration in the deep and instinctive attachment of the Marāthās to their ancestral village hakks (rights), and in the character of their two most widely honoured deities. The more exalted position now occupied by Bhavāni as the result of the catholic labours of the heralds’ college of Brahmanism cannot disguise the fact that she was originally one of the savage mother-goddesses worshipped by the older tribes of the hills and forests of India. Khandoba likewise, the patron of jungle-robbers and of old nomadic tribes of sheep and cattle graziers, combining in himself ancient plant-worship and non-Brahmanic animal-worship, and associated at his chief shrines with a custom of male-dedication and sanctified harlotry which finds its only parallel in the cults of obviously pre-Aryan figures like Yellamma, the universal mother, and of the ancient goddesses of Assyria, Babylonia and Egypt, seems to deride the hypothesis that his devoted worshippers can justifiably lay claim to Scythian, Rājpūt or indeed any strain of foreign blood. Although his cult has been to some extent overlaid by later accretions arising out of the Brahmanic practice of absorbing the local gods of the older tribes into post-Vedic Hinduism, Khandoba still remains primarily a non-Aryan spirit-scaring god of fertility, and maintains his pristine importance simply because his devotees, the upper and lower-class Marāthās and allied tribes and castes, are the direct descendants of the people who established his cult in prehistoric Mahārāshtra.