The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s3.3

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.