The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.48

v1.c17.48

While there is much of truth in this view, it must be admitted that it exaggerates the freedom of the Rigveda from caste. As we have seen, the probabilities are that the main, though not the earliest, part of the Saṁhitā had its origin not in the Punjab proper but in the sacred country of later Brāhmanism, the land known in the Saṁhitās of the succeeding period as Brahmāvarta. Moreover, there is no actual proof in the Rigveda that the priesthood was not then a closed hereditary class. The term Brāhmaṇa, ‘son of a Brahmā,’ seems, on the contrary, to show that the priesthood was normally hereditary, and there is no instance which can be quoted of any person who is said to be other than a priest appearing to exercise priestly functions. We are told that there is a case of a king exercising the functions of domestic priest and sacrificing himself for his people, but the alleged case, that of Devāpi, rests only on an assertion of a commentator on the hymn (x, 98), in which Devāpi appears, that he was originally a king. Even, however, if this were the case, it must be remembered that even after the complete establishment of the caste system, it was still the privilege of kings to exercise some priestly functions, such as that of the study of the nature of the absolute, a practice ascribed to them in the Upanishads. The arguments regarding the warrior class rest on a misunderstanding. Even in the latest Vedic period we have no ground to suppose that there was a special class which reserved its energies for war alone, and that the industrial population and the agriculturists allowed the fate of their tribe to be decided by contest between warrior bands, but the Rigveda certainly knows of a ruling class, the Kshatriya, and the Vedic kingship was normally hereditary, so that we may well believe that even then there existed, though perhaps only in embryo, a class of nobles, who are aptly named in the term of the *Purushasūkta*, Rājanyas, as being ‘men of kingly family.’ There are traces, moreover, of the division of the tribe into the holy power (*brahman*), the kingly power (*kshatra*), and the commonalty (*viç*), and, while it is true that the caste system is only in process of development in the Rigveda, it seems impossible to deny that much of the groundwork upon which the later elaborate structure was based was already in existence.