Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c11.s5.17

c11.s5.17

**The land of the Bharatas.** A similarly important position attaches to the Bharatas in the texts. We have already referred to two Bharata princes in the *Śatapatha* list of Aśvamedha offerers and their greatness is stated in the accompanying verses to be as far beyond that of other mortals as the heavens are above the earth. In other places, the Bharatas are regarded as the exemplars of correct conduct, the knowledge of whose customs is stated to be something which not everyone has [*Śat.*, v, 4, 4, 1; *Ait. Br.*, ii, 25; iii, 18]. According to Oldenberg, the testimony of the Rigveda shows the Bharatas emerging, out of the struggles in which the migratory period of the Vedic stocks was passed, as the possessors of the regions round the Sarasvatī and Dṛishadvatī on whose banks the Bharata princes perform their sacrifices. The weapons of the Bharata princes and the poetical fame of their Ṛishis may have co-operated to acquire for the cult of the Bharatas the character of universally acknowledged rule and for the Bharatas a kind of sacral hegemony; hence Agni as friend of the Bharatas, the goddess Bhāratī, the sacredness of the Sarasvatī and Dṛishadvatī. Then came the period when the countless small stocks of the Saṁhitā age were fused together to form the greater peoples of the Brāhmaṇa period. The Bharatas found their place, probably together with their old enemies, the Pūrus [cf. the vanishing enmity in *Ṛv.*, i, 112, 4; vii, 19, 3], within the great complex of peoples now in process of formation, the Kurus; their sacred land now became Kurukshetra.