Ancient Indian Historical Tradition c17.38

c17.38

The story of Gālava’s doings⁸ is an excellent instance of the third kind of spurious synchronisms. In order to earn the special fee required by his teacher Viśvāmitra he obtained from king Yayāti Nāhuṣa⁹ his daughter Mādhavī and offered her in turn to king Haryaśva of Ayodhyā, king Divodāsa of Kāśi, king Uśīnara of Bhojanagara, and Viśvāmitra himself, each for a fourth part of the fee, and they begot of her one son each, Vasumanas, Pratardana, Śivi and Aṣṭaka respectively. Then he returned her to her father. This story makes all those kings and Viśvāmitra contemporary, and three facts show its absurdity. First, Uśīnara was a descendant of Anu, Yayāti’s son, by some generations; secondly, this the first Viśvāmitra was a distant descendant in the Kānyakubja line, which sprang out of the Aila race just before Yayāti’s time; and thirdly, Gālava was Viśvāmitra’s own son!¹⁰—a fact of which the story is ignorant.¹¹ The appended table of genealogies will display these errors clearly. Haryaśva and Uśīnara probably were contemporaries, but Viśvāmitra was later and Divodāsa (Pratardana’s father) later still, as will be shown by the genuine synchronisms in the next chapter; and Yayāti was far earlier. The story makes kings Vasumanas, Pratardana, Śivi and Aṣṭaka brothers and contemporaries, and this statement appears elsewhere also,¹ especially in a further fable ² that Yayāti was cast out from heaven for pride and fell at Naimiṣa forest, where those four kings were assembled, and they were made known to him as his daughter’s sons. The story is manifestly a brahmanical fabrication, and may have been developed from the fact that the three verses of which Rigveda x, 179 consists are attributed one each to Śivi, Pratardana and Vasumanas (who is called son of Ruśadaśva or Rohidaśva, which are almost synonymous with Haryaśva), in order to explain how the single verses composed by these three kings became combined into one hymn.³ But how Aṣṭaka is joined with them is uncertain.