The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s2.24

Language: English

c2.s2.24.1

So it seems to me that the ethical sense of a subsequent age might have worked upon the legends it received. Not the inversion of the story and of the characters was, perhaps, the aim of the later poets. They only, as I think, blurred the picture where it was too suggestive of evil in should-be types of holiness. But if we accept the inversion-theory, we shall believe that the Pāndus and their partisans, the priests of Vishnu, took a poem that was written to defame the Pāndus and Vishnu, and wrote it over again as to represent these as perfect. Such is the opinion of scholars justly eminent in criticism of the Epic and in Sanskrit scholarship. As to what basis this theory rests upon enough has been said. We owe all our constructive criticism as well as destructive in this line to Holtzmann; and it is necessary to say that, in suggesting other possibilities than those advocated by him, one only re-builds the material that he has furnished. But supposing it were possible that our present Epic is the legitimate continuation of an original theme, and not a total inversion of it, let us look at the conditions under which it might have arisen. It would not be necessary to reject the supposition of a Pāndu-Panchāla alliance against the Kurus; but there would be no reason for supposing the war essentially Panchāla's, with the Pāndus added as adventitious adherents of that older royal family.

c2.s2.24.2

The attempt to reconcile king Dhritarāshtra of the Yajur-Veda literature with the date of the late upstart Kurus may be abandoned, as common sense demands: and more than common sense. To that Brahmanic period king Dhritarāshtra is real; the Pāndus as a people are unknown. But to the Epic period the Pāndus are real, and the hypothecated king of the Kurus is a mere shadow. The real king of the Kurus (he receives the title of rājā in the poem as it stands to-day) is Duryodhana. It is only in the secondary fable that Dhritarāshtra is prominent. In the real action of the piece the latter is as good as silent, but becomes, first and last, conspicuous as a lay-figure on which to exhibit teachings of various sorts. To the writers of the Epic the Pāndus seem to have been genuine founders of a dynasty. What had they accomplished? They, a new race, not known by ancestors noble enough to be reflected in the older literature, became formidable through allying themselves with the Panchālas. They attacked and overthrew the venerable Kuru empire, and seated themselves upon the throne of these vanquished Kurus. And which Kurus? Those of the Vedic age? Is it likely that such an event could have taken place unnoticed in the light of the Dhritarāshtra of the Yajus? We must remember that Janamejaya is also of Brahmanic antiquity, but that the Pāndus are unknown. The solution of the difficulty seems to me to lie in a very likely assumption.

c2.s2.24.3

It is this: that the Pāndus fought and conquered the Kurus, not the old Kurus in their height of renown, but the weak descendants of that race, who came long after the Dhritarāshtra of the Brahmanic period. And now what may we imagine to have followed? The priests of the Pāndus—who, as I think, wrote the poem originally on essentially the same lines as portrayed today, barring the inferior moral tone of the first version—in order to exalt the glory of the new house, made out the combat of their national heroes to have been not with the weaker man who really fell, but with the race in its early pride, supported and headed by the glory of the Dhritarāshtra of old, whose name perhaps, without his power, was really borne by this, his inferior descendant. It is not at all necessary to insist poetically on the double name. Hindu historical feeling is quite capable of simply introducing the ancient king into the new era—or, we may perhaps better say, of running the modern contest with all its appurtenances back into a remoter Vedic age. In this same spirit they also pretended that the ancient Janamejaya was the son of the modern hero: that is to say, they put back the hero into an antiquity obscure enough to father him upon Janamejaya. The older, the more venerable; the more venerable, the more glorious the contest. So, too, the eldest of the Pāndus, Yudhishthira, once called Dharma, draws about him the mantle of wisdom associated with that name from the early period;

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and while in the first stratum of the poem he is nothing but a headstrong, wilful, and cruel head of a family-clan, in the pseudo-Epic he is the incarnation of law and morality.