Ancient Indian Education (Brahmanical and Buddhist) c17.68

c17.68

The kind of religious or Vedic knowledge which these princes were expected to acquire will be further evident from the fact that in the great war we find among the active combatants a good many very young knights. One of the foremost of these was Abhimanyu who is represented as only sixteen years old, already married and regarded as a full-fledged knight [i, 67]. Old Droṇa [vii, 192, 65; 193, 43] at eighty-five is spoken of as "acting in battle as if he were a vigorous youth of sixteen". The same kind of evidence is also given in the Rāmāyaṇa where, when Rāma is about to be taken away from home on his military mission, his father exclaims: "He is as yet but a boy (*bāla*); he is not yet sixteen and has not acquired the art of using arms." This passage thus further shows that the age of sixteen marked the end of boyhood before which the prince was normally expected to have acquired the military arts and qualified for the vocation or mission of his life [*Rāmā.*, i, 23, 2; iii, 42, 23].