Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c16.2

c16.2

The later Vedic texts speak of four varṇas, a few non-Aryan tribals such as the Niṣādas and Andhras, and of about a dozen craft groups. All these find place in the puruṣamedha described in the Yajus texts. The object of this sacrifice was to establish some kind of rapport between the patriarchal ‘Aryans’ living on cattle-rearing and plough-agriculture and matrilineal non-Aryans engaged in hunting and hoe-cultivation. The puruṣmedha was evidently a religious mechanism for bringing the divergent orders, occupations and non-Aryan peoples under one umbrella. But these tribes and occupations did not assume the characteristics of caste in the brāhmaṇical sense. Another device introduced in later Vedic times to absorb the non-Aryan peoples in the brāhmaṇical fold was the theory of the vrātya. Vrātyas, as later explained by Kauṭilya and Manu, were originally dvijas who came to be regarded as ‘second class citizens’ because of their deviation from vrata or vow. The Magadhas, originally a people who settled down in Magadha, belonged to this category, and their king appears as a vrātya ruler in later Vedic texts. But the vrātya also included many other peoples. It was a package term used by the brāhmaṇas to cover such tribal people in the eastern zone as lived on hoe-cultivation, producing some kind of primitive maize calld gavedhuka,¹ which served as their food and the fodder of their cattle. They seem to have been a matrilineal people. Rudra, the god of animals, was the god of the vrātyas, who knew neither ploughing nor trading. The vrātyas were possibly the black-and-red ware people who used microliths and some copper implements in the pre-iron age in eastern U.P., Bihar and Bengal, and lived on fish and rice. However their material equipment does not suggest large settlements in the thickly forested areas of the Gaṅgā basin. Evidently the vrātya people consisted of several tribes such as the Niṣādas, Puñjiṣṭhas and others whose names are not mentioned. Members of a clan headed by its chief may have lived together for six generations, and at a time they may have numbered 200.¹ A clan was collectively admitted to later Vedic peasant society through the ritual known as vrātyastoma, and gradually it settled down to plough agriculture and developed as a caste. Some names mentioned in Manu may look back to much earlier times, but all this is speculative.