The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.116

v1.c17.116

In the Sanskrit epic the Kurus and the Pañchālas are conceived as being at enmity; and it is natural to enquire whether this tradition goes back to the Vedic period¹. The reply, however, must be in the negative, for the evidence adduced in favour of the theory is of the weakest possible character. In the Kāṭhaka Saṃhitā there is an obscure ritual dispute between a certain priest, Vaka, son of Dalbha, who is believed to have been a Pañchāla, and Dhṛitarāshṭra Vaicitravīrya, who is assumed to have been a Kuru king. But apart from the fact that a mere dispute on a point of ritual between a Pañchāla priest and a Kuru king could not prove any hostility between the two peoples, there is no ground for supposing that this Dhṛitarāshṭra was any one else than the king of the Kāçis who bears the same name and who was defeated by the Bharata prince, Sātrājita Çatānīka, and in the very same passage of the Kāṭhaka allusion is made to the union of the Kuru-Pañchālas. A second argument of some human interest is derived from the clever suggestion of Weber that in the revolting ceremony of the horse-sacrifice, one of the great kingly sacrifices by which the Indian king proclaimed his claim to imperial sway, the queen of the Kurus is compelled to lie beside the victim, since otherwise Subhadrikā, the wife of the king of Kāmpīla, the capital of Pañchāla, would take her place. If this were the case there would be convincing proof of an ancient rivalry which might well end in the bitter conflicts of the epic; but, unhappily, the interpretation is almost certainly incorrect. With the absence of evidence of opposition between the Kurus, assumed to have been specially Brāhmanical, and the Pañchālas, disappears any support for the theory², based on the phenomena of the later distribution of dialects in India, that the Kurus were a fresh stream of immigrants into India who came via Chitrāl and Gilgit and forced themselves as a wedge between the Āryan tribes already dwelling in the land. The theory proceeds to assume that, coming with few or no women, they intermingled with the Dravidian population with great completeness and produced the Āryo-Dravidian physical type. If these things were so, the fact was not at any rate known by the age which produced the Saṃhitās and the Brāhmaṇas.