The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c24.34

v1.c24.34

The fifth and last section of the Purāṇas, the *vamçānucharita*, gives an account of the kings of the earth, the descendants of Manu Vaivasvata, the 'son of the Sun.' The narrative uses all three tenses, past, present, and future; for it recounts the kings who have been, the kings who are, and the kings who are to be. The earliest of these genealogies, like the most ancient chronicles of other peoples, are legendary. They trace the descent of the rulers of this world from the Sun and Moon, and through them from the Creator—a claim inherited and still maintained by the Sūrajbansi and the Chandrabansi families of Rājput princes. Such pedigrees have been pieced together from fragments of religious lore or from fancied etymologies on to which old-world traditions and speculations have been engrafted. Ilā, the daughter of Manu, from whom the Lunar family is derived, personifies, as her name denotes, the sacrificial offering made by Manu in the legend of the Flood (*Çata. Br.*, I, 8, 1, 11). Such legendary characters are everywhere the result of man’s early speculations on the origin of the world. The first glimpses of authentic history only appear when tribal names are inserted in the genealogies under the disguise of eponymous ancestors. These, too, are the outcome of hypothesis, but of hypothesis founded on facts. All the members of a tribe are presumably descended from a common ancestor, and related tribes are descended from related ancestors. On these supposed individuals the names of the tribes are conferred; and they supply a sort of genealogical framework which continues to be filled in by tradition until the age of records. Once fashioned in this way such genealogies are accepted without question until the period when critical scholarship arises and undertakes its first duty, which is to discriminate between legend and fact in the story of past ages.