509

SECTION I

THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE VEDAS AND LISTS OF KINGS, AND THE LOCALITIES, COMPARED WITH THE ACCOUNTS IN MEGASTHENES.

A.

THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE VEDAS, LISTS OF KINGS, AND LOCALITIES.

HISTORICAL research upon India has shared pretty nearly the same fate as the geological investigations about the antiquity of the earth, which were set on foot almost at the same time. Sir William Jones was the Buffon of Indian chronology, and he, as well as the uncritical Wilford even, reckoned for a considerable period among their followers the students of the Romantic and Indo-Germanic school in France, and more especially in Germany. The enthusiasm excited in favour of Sanskrit, owing to its important bearing on philology and the pantheistic, semi-mystical, semi-poetical philosophy, exercised no very favourable influence on the criticism of German investigators. This period was succeeded by one of sober research under Colebrooke and Wilson, and their adherents Burnouf and Lassen. All the members of the more modern German Sanskrit school, as represented by Benfey, Roth, Max Müller, and Weber, have maintained the same standard of criticism. In regard to dates, a reaction has evidently taken place, and it is now in full swing. Its prevailing feature is doubt as to whether there is any thing historical in the Indian accounts prior to Alexander the Great, and the

decision indeed is against it. In my opinion the task of the historical critic is far from being concluded, but no remedy is to be looked for so long as Indian chronological research is carried on apart from the history of the Iranian Arians, and the rest of Central Asia.

True it is that the Sanskrit Indians have, of all the Arian races, the least turn for historical pursuits. With them everything resolves itself into the ideal and symbolical, and then assumes a fantastic shape.

But what right have we to extend this to the Vedic Indians, between whose intellectual tendencies and literature and that of the other Indians there is so marked a contrast, that it seems as if a deep chasm divided them ? The former are merely Iranian Arians who crossed the Indus, as regards their language, their customs, and religious observances.

How, indeed,

The few extant, but therefore more valuable, remains of their tradition prove that these Iranian Arians had not forgotten their earliest times. These will be brought into notice in the Fifth Book. could these reminiscences have been entirely lost in India at so early a date as that of the oldest Vedas, which are the monuments of Arian life in the country of the Five Rivers? For these Iranian Arians had not then adopted strictly Indian habits; they were not yet wholly immersed in the moral intoxication of Brahminical life, for whose votaries the realities of the world and the sanctity of history possessed no attractions or value.

According to the views of many modern Indian critics, indeed, all inquiry into the earlier times of India is a hopeless task, not only owing to the dreadful confusion (which cannot be denied) in the epic traditions with which we are at present acquainted, as well as the subsequent narratives, but because no authentic records have ever existed at all. We know enough, it is said, of the history of Indian literature to make us scout such

an idea as that annals once existed, which now are lost, to which Megasthenes may have had access. Any critic accustomed to biblical and Egyptian researches would see at once the serious flaw in the reasoning by which such a conclusion was arrived at. Weber's learned synopsis of Indian literature may suffice to prove how much of it, even down to the titlepage, has perished. But assuming there never were Indian annals, strictly historical chronicles, there may still have been genealogical registers containing more or less connected dates, accompanied by historical popular ballads, and that indeed in Vedic times, or at least very soon after. Such records, connected with their royal houses, are cited in both the epic histories. This is sufficient proof that several such existed, and, in fact, that though they exhibited considerable discrepancies in details, their common origin and the existence of a sort of settled framework are undeniable. There is no other way of explaining the common element in the long tradition of their primitive ages, which does not possess, and can never have possessed, any mythological meaning whatever, or any meaning but an historical one. This com

mon historical element is found in the old hymns, as compared with the Puranas and the epic narrators. How else can the occurrence of single isolated dates in our Sanskrit records, in reference to the length of certain periods, be accounted for, to say nothing at present about Megasthenes? Dates which are entirely inappropriate to all known traditions, astronomical as well as poetico-historical, recommend themselves, on the contrary, in preference to all others, in the estimation of the greatest critics. This, in the opinion of two commentators of the highest order, Wilson and Lassen, is especially the case as regards the commencement of the Kaliyug, an era said to have been current nearly 5000 years (3102 B. C.). We believe we shall be able to prove that it cannot have commenced till the tenth cen

tury before the Christian era, so that an extant very noteworthy date in the Brahminical books, although unsupported elsewhere, fixing it at about 1400 B.C., comes very close to the historical truth, as contrasted with the assumption of the present system.

Anuvansa, i. e. lists of kings, and genealogies, called Gôtra-vansa 220, if they contained the succession with a few short detached notices about the heads of tribes, were the groundwork on which the compilers of the earlier portions of these glorious legends based their narratives. There may have been hundreds of these which have long since perished; we have, indeed, direct evidence that such was the case. The Mahâbhârata contains two lists of kings of the race of the Moon which differ from each other. In one of them distichs are quoted from an older record, an Anuvansa in which facts were given as well as names.221 I will, however, at once admit that in my opinion none of these Sanskrit sources of information have any historical value, except in so far as they relate to matters within a certain range of sharply distinguished epochs. Personal history can only be introduced as an exceptional case, and even then the details are very doubtful. In the epics, Visvamitra is a king; it is true that his name occurs also in the Vedas, but there he is a minstrel in the service of several kings and tribes in the Indus country. All the ballads in the third book of the Rigveda are attributed to Visvamitra, or, rather, the successors of Visvamitra. On other occasions two names occur connected with each other, but the son of a hero in the epos is the father in the Vedas. The Vedic Gods, in the Sanskrit period, are completely thrown into the background by others of whom the Vedas either know nothing at all, Siva for instance, or else use their names in a totally different sense, as is the case with

220 Lassen, i. 494.

221 Id.

p.

495.