History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c81.844

v6.c81.844

This festival of Bhrātṛdvitīyā is really an independent one, but it was probably tacked on to the three festive days of Divālī in order to lengthen out the days of fun and joy. Sisters, when after their marriage they leave their brother's home, may not meet for years and further the sister may have become rich and the brother a poor man or vice versa. Our ancient writers evinced a keen appreciation of the bonds of disinterested affection between brothers and sisters and set apart a day in the year for their meeting to enable them to go over their sweet memories of childhood and to re-live for a day at least their early life which had gone forever. A religious tinge was added to the festival by recalling the two mythical personalities of Yama and Yamī, that figure in the famous Yama-Yamī hymn (Ṛg. X. 10). I should like to digress a little and strongly protest against the conclusion drawn by certain Western Sanskrit scholars that the hymn is an indication of the prevalence of the usage of the marriage of a brother and a sister among ancient Aryans. The hymn is a purely imaginative effort 'which bodies forth the forms of things unknown', as in the case of Ṛg. X. 119 where the poet imagines what Indra must have felt when treated to huge portions of Soma beverage. In Ṛg. X. 10.10⁵³⁹ the sage makes it clear that in future ages something like what was delineated in his fantasy might occur (namely, sisters might do unsisterly acts). Macdonell in his 'Vedic Mythology' (pp. 172-173) indulges in some facile assumptions. Yama may be an Indo-Iranian divinity, but Yamī does not occur in the Avesta at all, as he himself admits, but only in later Parsi writings. Therefore, what is stated in these later writings should not be foisted upon the sages of the Ṛgveda. He supposes that the sage in Ṛg. X. 10 indulges in propaganda for exonerating Yama from incest. Propaganda is well-known to Western countries in the 19th and 20th centuries A D The Ṛgveda nowhere states that the human race was produced from Yama and Yamī. There is no warrant for saying that Yamī is Indo-Iranian and consequently the myth of the human race being born from a brother and sister is not Indo-Iranian Pargiter in AIHT (p. 70) follows the ball set rolling by Macdonell and others and boldly asserts that, when the Vāyu (in 93. 12) says that Nahuṣa had six sons born of pitṛkanyā, Virajā, the word pitṛkanyā means 'sister' and Nahuṣa married his 'sister or half sister' and that union between brother and sister was not unknown as Ṛgveda X. 10 about Yama and Yamī shows. One suspects the motives of a writer like Pargiter who held. high judicial office in India, when he does not explain why ‘pitṛkanyā’ was used and not ‘svasṛ’, when he pays no heed to the fact that in many places in Vāyu (72. 5, 73. 1-2, 26, 36, 40, 45, 77 74) Menā, Acchodā, Pīvarī, Gauḥ, Yaśodā, Virajā herself, Narmadā and Gandhakālī are spoken of as ‘pitṝṇām mānasī kanyā’, that Vāyu (72), Matsya (13. 2-9) and other Purāṇas speak of seven groups of pitṛs and set out how from the mind-born daughters of pitṛs several scions were born Virajā (described as pitṛkanyā in Vāyu 93 12 which Pargiter naively renders as father’s daughter i e. sister) is spoken of in the same Purāṇa (Vāyu 73. 45) as the ‘mind-born daughter’ of these (i. e of Pitṛs) in the plural and not as ‘of the father’. Writers like Pargiter sometimes create more riddles by their so-called research than they can be said to have solved.