The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s3: II. Historical Value of the Epic
The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s3
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II. Historical Value of the Epic
c2.s3.1
In a land without history, legend becomes dangerously ennobled. We are driven to tales, senseless or sober, for the information that should properly come from record and statute. It is not to be denied that herein lies the possibility of perverting what results we have obtained, and of forcing a pictorial truth to serve as a historical statement. Nevertheless, although we must repudiate as unsound any chronological deductions drawn from Hindu story (for I do not believe that we can credit any of the professedly trustworthy genealogies given in the Epic), although we must confess that we neither know nor can know whether the tales of kings related in the Epic are to be relied upon at all, or in what degree they may be worthy of confidence, yet the main thread of the story and the network of legend with which it is entangled do certainly present opportunity for useful research from the sociological point of view; being in so far of historical worth as it is possible through this means to obtain a view of social relations that by the indigenous writers have been conceived as true, and may, therefore, rightly appear to us as probable. Again, although we labor in the Hindu Epic under the disadvantage of finding united as if in themselves coherent social conditions that plainly belong to many different dates, yet by circumspection we can distinguish fairly well between old and new, and secure two pictures of life that, if not absolutely, are yet relatively historical, and (comparing parallel literature) can illustrate what without over-confidence we may conceive to have been the conditions of social life in India at two periods: the first, that of the half-developed state of about two thousand five hundred years ago; the second, posterior to this by perhaps a thousand years, with portions newer still, bringing the final date to a period far later than our era.∗
c2.s3.2
∗ Lassen believes the Epic not much changed since Buddha's time. Few can now allow this. Compare *Ind. Alt.* i. 589.
c2.s3.3
To what extent we may make use in our investigation of the didactic sections contained in the Epic, is a question open to several answers. These portions are of course of late origin. Yet in a land so conservative as India we must concede that the gist of such dogmatic discourses had probably been for a long time the result of assumed and common custom, especially when the formal law of the early period essentially corroborates it; for law, as the Hindu is fond of saying, is based on custom; and custom, by the same authority, is unchangeable family or clan usage. Hence undisputed assertions specifying this or that as current custom may safely be supposed to have been based on traditions far older than the formulas in which they are handed down. But we must, of course, be conservative against allowing a too great elasticity of time in this regard. Such concrete examples of political wisdom and *bon mots* of polity are worthless except as possible embodiments of older usage; for they include much that the Epic proper does not touch upon, and that could not have been contained in the earlier version. Political or social truths, therefore, involved in many of these sayings can be predicated positively only of the period following the composition of the original poem, and asserted as universal only when strengthened by legal evidence of greater antiquity, or by support in Epic practice. For a true interpretation of the large collection of inferable and formally stated sociological data in the Epic, it is necessary to draw first a sketch of the old and then of the new world thereby presented. It stands to reason that in general much will here be found doubtful and open to criticism; and that, in particular, a certain meagreness will characterize the first, a comparative richness and perhaps suspicious fullness of detail the second picture.
c2.s3.4
But even the modern Epic, the full completed work—were we to deny to the student the chance of discriminating accurately between the bodies of material necessary to the making up of his two sketches—is not as a whole unimportant in the elucidation of the customs of India in the Middle Ages, reaching back more than two thousand years; though it may be that further study will necessitate our giving a much later date than has been assumed to much of the pseudo-Epic. Further, the impossibility of effecting a complete discrimination of old and new may make it seem to some a vain task to distinguish the factors by their age. It is true that our verdict as to which is early and which is late must in a measure be based upon purely *a priori* assumptions; while it should, where this is possible, certainly be dependent upon an intimate acquaintance with the literature preceding and following the Epic; for many of the threads of our poem are older than its present literary form, and have often been preserved as fragments caught in a substance foreign to them; while what influence, on the other hand, of other sects or other races has made itself felt in the re-weaving of the tale needs careful analysis, being yet far from determined. But a review of what the Epic tells us may, it seems to me, be serviceable in supplying facts that in turn may help the critique of the Epic itself, after these have been compared with results drawn from other sources. I have therefore collected the Epic data as positive aids to research, but as historical material would use them at present only tentatively.