The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.25

v1.c17.25

More important by far, it may be believed, than the intertribal warfare of the peoples who called themselves Āryan were their contests with the aborigines, the Dāsas or Dasyus as they are repeatedly called. The same terms are applied indifferently to the human enemies of the Āryans and to the fiends, and no criterion exists by which references to real foes can be distinguished in every case from allusions to demoniacal powers. The root meaning of both words is most probably merely ‘foe’; but in the Rigveda it has been specialised to refer, at least as a rule, to such human foes as were of the aboriginal race. Individual Dāsas were Ilibiça, Dhuni and Chumuri, Pipru, Varchin, and Çambara, though the last at least has been transformed by the imagination of the singers into demoniac proportions. The only peoples named which can plausibly be deemed to have been Dāsas are the Çimyus, who are mentioned among the foes of Sudās in the battle of the ten kings, and who are elsewhere classed with Dasyus, the Kīkaṭas with their leader Pramaganda, and perhaps the Ajas, Yakshus, and Çigrus. The main distinction between the Āryan and the Dāsa was clearly that of colour, and the distinction between the Āryan *varṇa*, ‘colour,’ and the black colour is unquestionably one of the main sources of the Indian caste system. The overthrow of the black skin is one of the most important exploits of the Vedic Indian. Second only to the colour distinction was the hatred of men who did not recognise the Āryan gods: the Dāsas are constantly reproached for their disbelief, their failure to sacrifice, and their impiety. Nor is there much doubt that they are the phallus worshippers who twice are referred to with disapproval in the Rigveda, for phallus worship was probably of prehistoric age in India and by the time of the Mahābhārata it had won its way into the orthodox Hindu cult. We learn, disappointingly enough, little of the characteristics of the Dāsas, but two epithets applied in one passage to the Dasyus are of importance. The first is *mṛidhravāchaḥ* which has been interpreted to refer to the nature of the aborigines’ speech; but which, as it elsewhere is applied to Āryan foes like the Pūrus, probably means no more than ‘of hostile speech.’ The other epithet, *anāsaḥ*, is more important: it doubtless means ‘noseless,’ and is a clear indication that the aborigines to which it is applied were of the Dravidian type as we know it at the present day. With this accords the fact that the Brāhūī speech still remains as an isolated remnant in Baluchistān of the Dravidian family of tongues¹. But though the main notices of the Rigveda are those of conflict against the Dāsas and the crossing of rivers to win new lands from them, it is clear that the Āryans made no attempt at wholesale extermination of the people. Many of the aborigines doubtless took refuge before the Āryan attacks in the mountains to the north or to the south of the lands occupied by the invaders, while others were enslaved. This was so normal in the case of women that, in the literature of the next period, the term Dāsī regularly denotes a female slave; but male slaves are often alluded to in the Rigveda, sometimes in large numbers, and wealth was already in part made up of ownership of slaves. The metaphorical use is seen in the name of one of the greatest of Vedic kings, Divodāsa, ‘the servant of heaven.’ In the Purushasūkta, or ‘Hymn of Purusha,’ which belongs to the latest stratum of the Rigveda, and which in mystic terms describes the creation of the four castes from a primeval giant, occurs for the first time the term Çūdra, which includes the slaves as a fourth class in the Āryan state. Probably enough this word, which has no obvious explanation, was originally the name of some prominent Dāsa tribe conquered by the Āryans.