The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s2.20

c2.s2.20

To answer this question (if we may assert for the time being that the inversion-theory is not yet established), let us consider what were the great developing factors of our Epic. What induced the insertion of this huge bulk of plainly late matter? In part, these additions consist of religious novelties; in part, they are of moral-didactic origin. Has not this last influence been under-estimated in treating of the ‘working-over’ of the poem? Let us reflect upon the fact, evident to anyone that has traced the lines of growth in Hindu civilization, that, as religion descended, morality ascended; that the later religious feeling was less simple and less pure than the earlier, but the later morality was higher and stricter than that of a former age; or that, at least, the didactic morality as last inculcated was superior to that recognized at first. Consider how penetrated is the Epic by this later morality; how ethical need imposes long sermons on us (not religious) at every turn; how it has added chapter after chapter at variance with earlier feeling and custom; how it everywhere teaches abhorrence of wrong acts, from a point of view often of sternest right; how it condemns the barbarities of an early uncivilized community; how it imposes its new law on the daily acts of life; how it has composed a formal ‘code of fighting’ that inculcates law more humane than was possibly consistent with the practices of the older times commemorated by the first form of the poem—and then let us ask this question: is it not reasonable to suppose that those same priests who framed the fighting code and endeavored to implant in their brutal warrior-kings a moral, not to say a chivalrous sentiment, might have been swayed by two opposing desires in handing down their national Epic? We know what happened to the text of Homer when his morality offended that of certain Alexandrians. Is it too much to suppose that the Hindu moral teachers (for they were truly that, while being as a body unscrupulous of rewards) felt this same necessity of expunging or excusing the sins of those heroes who had gradually become national models of royal and knightly honor? I conceive it possible that these priests, after spending much labor to expound what a king ought to be, should have made every effort to cause those heroes who had now become from success and glory of war popular types of perfect knights to appear in a light consonant with the moral principles that priestly ethics would inculcate. But how was this possible? The poem was there; it was the popular story; it teemed with records of acts harmonious with the older morality, inconsistent with that of the developed moral sense. So—might they not?—they modified what they could not erase; they excused what they could not pardon; they called in as a last resort the direct command of their deity to justify what to mortal apprehension was unjustifiable; for, if Vishnu commanded a hero to do this, who could question the right or the wrong? The early tale artlessly relates how Arjuna, the defender of the faith, shoots Karna when the latter is helpless. Did the old morality revolt at this? I think not. But the new morality comes, that says ‘no noble (Aryan) knight will fight except on equal terms.’