The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.36

c11.36

The pattern, then, seems to have been a yearly circuit of transhumance and raiding, starting from permanent agricultural settlements and returning there again for the agricultural operations of the monsoon crop. It seems plausible that the eastward movements of the Vedic Aryans should be viewed in these terms, as a gradual extension of these centers and their circuits into the eastern "frontier areas." That this implied a growing density of agricultural settlements—as is also suggested by the Kuru-Pañcālas' seasonal movement to settled areas—seems equally plausible. This may be indicated also by the shift in meaning of the world *grāma* from "trekking warrior band" to settled "village" in the later ritual texts. In these texts, fairly densely settled tracts with contiguous villages are, if not the standard, at least the ideal of peaceful conditions.³⁸ But this is as far as the Vedic ritual texts will allow us to go. We may surmise that sedentarization and expansion of settled agriculture played a role in the rise of Vedic ritualism, but our texts have nothing to say about this, let alone about the urban world of trade, commerce, and courts found in early Buddhist texts. Instead, the ritual texts keep the imagery of the trekking warrior who is forever yoking his horses to set out again to lord it over the *kṣemya*, the stay-at-home sedentary people.³⁹ In this archaic world, the brahmin is not yet the priestly expert, but a warrior who is proclaimed a *brāhmaṇa* at his consecration (*dīkṣā*) and who sets out on a chariot, even though the ritual no longer has use for chariots or wide-ranging movements.