The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c19.s6.45

c19.s6.45

35. The story is used to legitimate the separation of the varṇas, who should not eat each other's food, that is, should not maintain commensality. But it fails to explain why the kṣatriya is excluded from the Soma drink, whereas Indra, as Rāma Mārgaveya explains, later won back the Soma drink at Tvaṣṭṛ's sacrifice. The difficulty seems to be that Indra regained the Soma drink in a contest, which is out of the question in the classical ritual. Moreover, the doctrine of the sacrificial drink proper to each of the varṇas seems to have originally referred to each of the four classificatory groups having charge of a particular kind of food, which is exchanged 36. The fact that the dispute develops into a treatise on food does not mean a later accretion but is quite consistent with the central concern of this contest (the goods of life). It may be noted that the mahāvrata is also consistently considered as (Prajāpati's) “food.”