The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.6

v1.c17.6

From these materials conclusions can be drawn only with much caution. It is easy to frame and support by plausible evidence various hypotheses, to which the only effective objection is that other hypotheses are equally legitimate, and that the facts are too imperfect to allow of conclusions being drawn. It is, however, certain that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Indians entered India. The geographical area recognised in the Saṁhitā is large, but it is, so far as we learn, occupied by tribes which collectively are called Āryan, and which wage war with dark-skinned enemies known as Dāsas. If, as may be the case, the Āryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvatī river, south of the modern Ambāla¹. Only thus, it seems, can we explain the fact of the prominence in the hymns of the strife of the elements, the stress laid on the phenomena of thunder and lightning and the bursting forth of the rain from the clouds: the Punjab proper has now, and probably had also in antiquity, but little share in these things; for there in the rainy season gentle showers alone fall. Nor in its vast plain do we find the mountains which form so large a part of the poetic imagining of the Vedic Indian. On the other hand, it is perhaps to the Punjab with its glorious phenomena of dawn, that we must look for the origin of the hymns to Ushas, the goddess Dawn, while the concept of the laws of Varuṇa, the highest moral and cosmic ideal attained by the poets, may more easily have been achieved amid the regularity of the seasonal phenomena of the country of the five rivers.