The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.135

v1.c17.135

The question how far change of caste was possible raises difficult problems. The evidence of any change is scanty in the extreme. The most that can be said is that it does not seem to have been impossible. Thus in the Rigveda, as we have seen, Viçvāmitra is a priest, the Purohita of the king Sudās, but in the Pañchaviṃça and the Aitareya Brāhmaṇas he is treated as of royal descent, of the family of the Jahnus. The Pañchaviṃça Brāhmaṇa also speaks of certain persons as royal seers; and the later tradition, preserved in the *Anukramaṇī* or 'index' to the composers of the Rigveda, ascribes hymns to such royal seers, in some cases at least without any real foundation. Yāska, in one instance, represents a prince, Devāpi, as sacrificing for his brother Çaṃtanu, the king; but here we can see from the passage of the Rigveda on which his narrative is based that he has no warrant for this theory. In the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa a king, Viçvantara, sacrifices without his priests, the Çyāparṇas; but the case has no cogency, for the mention of other priests in the context suggests the natural inference that he used one or other of these groups. Some kings are mentioned in the Pañchaviṃça Brāhmaṇa and elsewhere as having been great sacrificers; but this may mean no more than that they were the patrons of the sacrifice, the normal part of the king. We come nearer to contact with fact in the concurrent stories of the Upanishads which show kings like Janaka of Videha, Açvapati king of the Kekayas in the Punjab, Ajātaçatru of Kāçi, and Pravāhaṇa Jaivali of Pañchāla disputing with and instructing Brāhmans in the lore of the *brahman*, the unity which is the reality of the world. Very possibly this attribution is mainly due to considerations of the advantage of conciliating the kings who were the patrons of the new philosophy; but, in any case, there is no reason to deny that kings could and did take interest in intellectual movements, and we cannot from such facts infer that there was any possibility of interchange of caste: we cannot say that, if a king became a seer, as the Jaiminīya Upanishad Brāhmaṇa asserts in one case, it really meant that he was regarded as ceasing to belong to the kingly caste, any more than we can say that, if a priest became king, as was not unknown later at least, he thereby suffered any loss of his priestly position. One case of interest remains, that of Satyakāma Jābāla who was accepted as a pupil by a distinguished priest because he showed promise, although all he could tell of his ancestry was that he was the son of a slave girl; but, evidently, his father might have been a Brāhman, and the case is only of value as negativing the idea of any unnatural rigidity of institutions in the Vedic age. The history of later India shows how rigid distinctions might be in theory but how ingeniously they might in practice be evaded in the individual case. What is more significant, perhaps, is that there is no instance recorded in the Vedic texts of a Vaiçya rising to the rank of priest or a prince: the two upper hereditary classes might to some degree permit closer relations, but they seem to have regarded the commoner as definitely beneath them.