The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.28

v1.c17.28

Like the Dāsas and Dasyus in their appearance both as terrestrial and as celestial foes are the Paṇis. The word seems beyond doubt to be connected with the root seen in the Greek *pernēmi*, and the sense in which it was used by the poets must have been something like ‘niggard.’ The demons are niggards because they withhold from the Āryan the water of the clouds: the aborigines are niggards because they refuse the gods their due, perhaps also because they do not surrender their wealth to the Āryan without a struggle. The term may also be applied to any foe as an opprobrious epithet, and there is no passage in the Saṃhitā which will not yield an adequate meaning with one or other of these uses. But it has been deemed by one high authority¹ to reveal to us a closer connexion of India and Irān than has yet suggested itself: in the Dāsas Hillebrandt sees the Dahae, in the Paṇis the Parnians, and he locates the struggles of Divodāsa against them in Arachosia. Support for this view he finds in the record of Divodāsa's conflicts with Bṛisaya and the Pārāvatas, with whose names he compares that of the Satrap Barsentes and the people Paruetae of Gedrosia or Aria. Similarly he suggests that the Sṛiñjaya people, who were connected like Divodāsa with the Bhāradāja family, should be located in Irān, and he finds in the Sarasvatī, which formed the scene of Divodāsa's exploits, not the Indian stream but the Irānian Harahvaitī. Thus the sixth book of the Rigveda would carry us far west from the scenes of the third and seventh which must definitely be located in India. But the hypothesis rests on too weak a foundation to be accepted as even plausible.