The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s3.1

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.∗