Shudras in Ancient India: A Social History of the Lower Order down to circa A.D. 600 c8.53

c8.53

In such a postulate the Āryan conquerors are codsidered to be identical with the Ārya race, and the non-Āryans with the Dāsa and Dasyu races. But it has been shown by H. W. Bailey that the racial import cannot be drawn uniformly from the term ārya in all the Ṛg Vedic references in which it is used. The term can be derived from the base ar, which means to get.³ In the Iranian references the term ārya stands for possessor or noble,⁴ and its extension ārya does not have a different sense in the Vedic texts,⁵ not to speak of its use in the sense of noble or civilised in post-Vedic Sanskrit and Buddhist and Jain texts.⁶ "The ārya are the party of the poets, and certainly it is a laudatory epithet".⁷ From all this it may be inferred that the leaders of the Rg Vedic people or gods who are extolled in the hymns as ārya were either possessors of wealth or noble or both. But too much cannot be made of their wealth. In a predominantly pastoral society the existing forms of property could not be accumulated on any scale.¹ Therefore the Rg Vedic society was organised neither on the basis of social division of labour nor on that of differences in wealth. The Rg Vedic society was primarily organised on the basis of kin, tribe, and lineage. The terms used for various types of kin-based units occur frequently. Thus jana is mentioned about 275 times and viś about 170 times. Similarly gaṇa and vrāta repeatedly occur. These units seem to be fairly large, because kula, which stands for family and later for noble family, is mentioned only once in the Rg Veda, and that too as a part of the term kulapā. However if the term gṛha is taken in the sense of family, it is mentioned many times in the Rg Veda, although these occurrences are less than 100 and therefore far less frequent than those in the case of jana and viś. The ‘Aryan’ tribes mentioned in the Rg Veda may not have belonged to the same ethnic stock, but they were united by a common language and a common style of life. The term Āryan therefore used by us may be understood in this sense.