Tribes in Ancient India c77.171

c77.171

The Tukhāras are mentioned in the *Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa* (LVII, 39) along with the Kāmbojas, Daradas, Barbaras and Cīnas, all of whom are described as ‘races of men outside’ (*vāhyato narāḥ*). The *Vāyupurāṇa* (XIV, 118) reads Tuṣāras instead, meaning of course the same people. They are mentioned in the *Mahābhārata* both as Tukhāras⁹ as well as Tuṣāras.¹⁰ The Tukhāras are also mentioned in the *Rāmāyaṇa*.¹¹ From the *Vanaparvan* of the *Mahābhārata* the Tukhāras seem to have been an outside northern race bordering on the Himalayas. The *Harivaṃśa* groups them along with the Śakas, Pahlavas, Daradas and others who are all branded as Mlecchas and Dasyus. Strabo (XI, 515) says: ‘The best known of the nomad tribes are those who drove the Greeks out of Bactria,—the Asii, the Pasiani, the Tochari, and the Sacarauli, who came from the country on the other side of the Jaxartes, over against the Sacae and Sogdiani, which country was also in occupation of the Sacae.’ Lassen identifies the Tukhāras with this Tochari tribe and locates them on the north of the Hindu Kush.¹² The geographer Ptolemy mentions the Tokeroi, who are doubtless identical with the Tukhāras as an important element of the Bactrian population. The *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* seems to point to the same people when it speaks of ‘the warlike nations of the Bactrians’. The Tukhāras continued as a tribe till the ninth and tenth centuries of the Christian era when they seem to have played an important part in the history of Kashmir.