War in Ancient India c6.s1.2

c6.s1.2

In this connexion it would be interesting to examine the true nature of the āgneya-astras. Kauṭalya describes agni-bāṇa,³² and mentions three recipes—agni-dhāraṇa, kṣepyo-agni-yoga, and viśvāsaghāti. The agni-dhāraṇa is said to consist of small balls made of the dung of the ass, camel, goat and sheep, mixed with the wood of sarala (pinus longifolia), devadāru (deodar), the leaf of pūtitṛṇa (lemon grass), guggulu, śrīveṣṭaka (turpentine) and lac. The kṣepyo-agni-yoga was a fire arm consisting of ‘the dung of the horse, ass, camel or cattle, mixed with priyāla cūrṇa (buchanania latifolia), avalguja (vernonia authelmintica), lamp black and bees’ wax’. Viśvāsaghāti was composed of ‘the powder of all the metals as red as fire or the mixture of the powder of kumbhi, lead, zinc, mixed with the charcoal powder of the flowers of paribhadraka, palāśa and hair, and with oil wax and turpentine’. From the nature of the ingredients of the different compositions it would appear that they were highly inflammable and could not be easily extinguished. About the third and the last recipe, a recent writer remarks: ‘The Viśvāsaghāti-agni-yoga was virtually a bomb which burst and the fragments of metals were scattered in all directions. The agni-bāṇa was the fore-runner of a gun-shot…… Sometimes the metallic head of the arrow was made red-hot by charcoal fire and the hot arrow will prove more dangerous than the cool. The aboriginal tribes of Kols and Santals of Bengal and Bihar shoot bear with redhot arrows, which they say, kill the beasts while cool arrows prove ineffective. It is to be noted that among the war materials collected in the battlefield of Kurukṣetra charcoal was one’.³³