The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c22.26

v1.c22.26

Although the epic age in India must necessarily be an epoch too elastic for historical purposes, since it is not at all certain that any one epic statement may not be many years later than another, yet the effect of this now trite observation is to exaggerate the relation between isolated cases and the epic mass. It is true that we have additions to the greater epic which are hundreds of years later than the mass, but it is possible from the mass to get an impression which will represent conditions on the whole, and we are tolerably sure that this whole is bounded by the space of from three to four centuries, since external evidence, inscriptions, the Greek reference to the Indian Homer³, etc., prove that the great epic in nearly its present extent existed before the fourth century A.D., and negative evidence in India makes it improbable that any epic existed earlier than the fourth century B.C. Since the length of the work requires the assumption of several centuries for its completion as it now exists, the centuries immediately preceding our era seem to be those to which it is most reasonable on general grounds to assign the composition of the Mahābhārata as a whole. This agrees best also with the external data to which reference has been made in the preceding chapter. During these centuries we find a revival of Brāhmanism, a cult of Vishṇuism by the masses and a return to Brāhmanism in a modified form indicated by the Çivaite faith of the kings of the north-western part of the country. Now Vishṇuism is the cult that permeates the great epic, though it contains tales showing an older Brāhmanism, and the Çivaite portions are chiefly late in character. Again it is not unreasonable to assume a certain connexion between the two epics. We cannot think of them as isolated productions of the western and eastern parts of the country. That they represent in general a western and eastern cycle of epic material is true, but there are sundry considerations which make it impossible to believe that they arose independently. In the first place, while the metre of the Mahābhārata represents a less polished verse than that of the Rāmāyaṇa, that metre is so nearly that of the Rāmāyaṇa, especially in its later portions, that the two are practically the same. Secondly, there are many tales, genealogies, fables, etc., which are identical in the two epics. Thirdly, the phraseology of the two epics is so cast in one mould that hundreds of verse-tags, phrases, similes, etc., are verbally the same. These correspond to the iterata found in Homeric verse, and indicate as do the Grecian parallels that there was a certain common epic body of phrase and fable. Fourthly, the economic conditions and social usages as represented in the two epics are sufficiently alike for us to be able to draw on both together for a picture of the times showing few discordant elements. In detail, the references in the Rāmāyaṇa betray a later or more advanced stage in some particulars, such as architectural elaboration, plans of temples, etc., which may be due to a higher civilisation; but in general the life of priest, noble, people of the lower castes, slaves, etc., is the same in both epics, and except for the use of caste-names does not differ from that exhibited by Buddhistic works of the same period. The chief difference here is that the Buddhists speak more of householder and gildman as if they were separate orders. But the Gehapati or householder is also a common expression for the ordinary man of affairs in Sanskrit works, and the gilds as shown above in discussing the Sūtras (p. 247) have their importance admitted by the authors of the Sūtras and epics alike. It is therefore more a question of terminology than a vital distinction when we find that the social order is reckoned as composed of priest, warrior, householder, gildman, instead of priest, warrior, and ‘people’s man,’ Vaiçya, as the Brāhman priests divided the ‘regenerate’ members of the community¹.