The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c9.25

c9.25

Now Prajāpati is the representative of the classical nondualistic, nonagonistic conception of sacrifice, and it stands to reason that he can hardly be the subject of a verbal contest and that consequently the blame is not put in dialogue form. It is rather with Indra, in a sense Prajāpati's predecessor as the divinity presiding over the sacrifice, that we expect this to be the case; not so much because of the warlike sound and fury of his exploits, which have perhaps been overstressed, as because of his essentially ambiguous nature. Because of his violent cosmogonic exploits, he is not only praised, but, like the mahāvrata sacrificers, he is strongly abused. Thus he is blamed for his violence by an inauspicious "voice" (*aślīlā vāc*) accusing him of brahmin-slaying (*brahmahatyā*).³¹ These acts of violence even are the subject of a contest, as recorded by the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa*.³² King Viśvantara Sauṣadmana performs a sacrifice from which the Śyāparṇas are excluded; the latter nevertheless sit down in the sacrificial enclosure; the king then gives orders to remove these "perpetrators of evil deeds, speakers of impure language."³³ Then the Śyāparṇas, boasting of their prowess in winning the Soma drink, appoint one of them, Rāma Mārgaveya, as their champion. Rāma, claiming to be one who knows "thus",³⁴ challenges the king, who asks contemptuously: "What is it that you know, you second-rate brahmin (*brahmabandhu*)?" Rāma then recounts Indra's acts of violence leading to his exclusion from the Soma drink, an exclusion shared to the present day by his human counterpart, the kṣatriya. The point here is that the Soma drink belongs by right to the brahmin Śyāparṇas, whereas the king, who tries to withhold it from them, should be excluded. The debate then develops into an exposition by Rāma on the sacrificial food proper to each of the four varṇas and is concluded by the gift of a thousand cows by the king to the brahmin Rāma Mārgaveya and the reinstatement of the Śyāparṇas at the sacrifice.