facts, without criticism, but we should have possessed a tradition of which the outline would have been approximately correct, and a description of manners historically true for the period when the poems arose and were thrown into shape – though untrue for the period depicted in the poem – after deducting what was due to the idealism of the poet. Unfortunately, repeated revisions and alterations have almost effaced the original lines; each new stage of civilisation attained by the Indians has eagerly sought to infuse its ideas and conceptions into the national tradition; older and later elements lie side by side often without any attempt at reconciliation, sometimes in direct opposition. The original warlike character of the poetry is forced into the background by the priestly point of view of a later age. In the poems in their present form there is none of that freshness of feeling and impression which is so vividly expressed in the prayers of the priests of the Bharatas, and the songs of the Tritsus; there is no immediate recollection at work. The effort to comprise all the stories and legends of the nation into a whole, to bring forward in these poems, as in a pattern and mirror of virtue, every lesson of religion and morals, and unite them into one great body of doctrine, has swelled the Indian Epos into a heavy and enormous mass, an encyclopædia, in which it is not possible without great labour to discover the connecting links of the narrative in the endless chaos of interpolations and episodes, the varying accounts of one and the same event. The Epos has thus become a tangle in which we cannot discover the original threads. It received its present form in the last centuries B.C.135
In the poem of the great war once waged by the kings of the Aryas on the Yamuna and the upper Ganges the Tritsus are no longer found on the Sarasvati or the Yamuna. The enemies at this period are the Matsyas and the Bharatas, the former on the Yamuna, the latter further to the east on the upper Ganges. The Tritsus have been forced further to the east, and have become lost among the Koçalas, who are situated on the Sarayu, or have taken that name; at any rate, the name of Sudas appears in the genealogical table of the rulers of the Koçalas, and in the Ramayana, as in other traditions, Vasishtha, who (or whose family) then gained victory by his prayers for Sudas, is the wisest priest among the Koçalas.136 Hence we may conclude that at a later time the Bharatas were more fortunate in their advance to the east. The struggle for their country and throne is the central point in the poem. According to the Mahabharata the rulers of the Bharatas spring from Manu. With Ila, the daughter of Manu, Budha the son of the moon, begot the 'pious' Pururavas, i. e. the far-famed. Pururavas is succeeded by Ayus, Nahusha, and Yayati. From Yayati's elder sons, Anu, Druhyu, Yadu, spring the Anus, the Drahyus, and the Yadavas,137 of whom we already have the two first as confederates of the Bharatas.138 Yayati was followed on the throne by his youngest son Puru. Dushyanta, one of the successors of Puru, married Çakuntala, the daughter of the priest Viçvamitra. To him she bore Bharata, who reduced all nations, and was lord of the whole earth. After Bharata, Bhumanyu, Suhotra, Ajamidha, and Samvarana, occupied the throne of Hastinapura, the chief city of the kingdom on the upper Ganges.139 In Samvarana's reign the kingdom was attacked by droughts, famine, and pestilence; and the king of the Panchalas advanced with a mighty host, and conquered Samvarana in the battle, who fled with his wife Tapati, his children and dependants, to the west, and took up his abode in a forest hut in the neighbourhood of the Indus. There the Bharatas lived for a long time, protected by the impenetrable country. Afterwards Samvarana reconquered the glorious city which he had previously inhabited, and Tapati bore him Kuru, whom the nation chose to be king. Kuru was succeeded on the throne of Hastinapura by Viduratha, Anaçvan, Parikshit, Pratiçravas, Pratipa and Çantanu.
The names which the poem places at the head of the genealogical tree of the rulers of the Bharatas are taken from the Veda. Yayati, like Pururavas, is commended in the Rigveda as a sacrificer. The name of Yayati's son, Puru, is borrowed from a name which in the Veda designates the Bharatas, who in these poems are variously called Purus and Bharatas.140 The tribes of the Anus, and the Druhyus, whom the Rigveda presented to us as confederates of the Bharatas, are in the Epos united with them by their ancestors. We have become acquainted with Viçvamitra as a priest and minstrel of the Bharatas, when they crossed the Vipaça against the Tritsus. In the Epos a descendant of Puru begets Bharata, i. e. the second eponymous hero of the tribe, with the daughter of Viçvamitra. In order to glorify the position of this priest, and secure his blessing for the royal race of the Puru-Bharatas, he becomes, in the Epos, by his daughter, the progenitor of king Bharata, to whom at the same time is ascribed the dominion over the whole earth. Thus far, it is obvious, the Epos goes to work upon the names of the tribes, and changes them into the names of heroes or kings. Apart from any poetical exaggeration, the wide dominion of the mythical king Bharata is, no doubt, an anticipation of the predominance to which the Bharatas attained at a later time on the upper Ganges. At any rate, according to the Epos, Samvarana, the descendant of Bharata, was compelled to return once more to the Indus, and there take up his abode for a long time. The statement that it is the Panchalas who conquer Samvarana is no doubt an invention based on the attitude of the Panchalas towards the Bharatas in the great war (p. 88). With Kuru, the successor of Samvarana, it is obvious that a new dynasty begins to reign over the Bharatas. This is obviously the first dynasty, whose achievements were widely felt, to which the Epic poetry could attach itself. Owing to his justice, Kuru is chosen by the nation of the Bharatas to be their king; this, of itself, is evidence of a new beginning. But Kuru is also said to be of divine origin, like Pururavas, the progenitor of his supposed ancestors. Pururavas is the child of the son of the moon and the daughter of Manu; Kuru is the child of Samvarana and the sister of Manu, the daughter of the god of light. Manu was the son of Vivasvat (p. 30); Tapati, the mother of Kuru, is the daughter of Vivasvat.141 The name Kurukshetra, i. e. land or kingdom of Kuru, which adheres to the region between the Drishadvati and the Yamuna, is evidence that the Bharatas, under the guidance of the kings descended from Kuru, first conquered this region and settled in it. When they had been there long enough to give to the country as a lasting name a title derived from their kings, they extended their settlements from the Yamuna further to the north-east. Here, on the upper Ganges, Hastinapura became the abode of their kings of the stock of Kuru, whose name now passed over to the people, so that the Bharatas, who, in the Veda, are called Purus and Bharatas, are now called Kurus after their royal family. With the Bharatas, or soon after them, other Arian tribes advance to the Yamuna; here we meet in the Epos the tribes which, according to the Rigveda, once fought with the Bharatas against the Tritsus, the Matsyas, and the Yadavas, the latter lower down on the Yamuna. Hence we may conclude with tolerable certainty that the Bharatas, under the guidance of the Kurus, succeeded in driving further to the east the tribes which had previously emigrated in that direction – the Tritsus (i. e. the Koçalas), Angas, Videhas, and Magadhas (as they were afterwards called), and that it was the family of the Kurus who established the first extensive dominion among the Indians on the upper Ganges. It is the struggles of the tribes, who once in part united with the Bharatas, and followed them into the valley of Yamuna, against the kingdom of the Kurus which are described in the Mahabharata.
Çantanu, the descendant of Kuru, had a son Bhishma, so we are told in this poem. When Çantanu was old he wished to marry a young wife, Satyavati; but her parents refused their consent, because the sons of their daughter could not inherit the throne. Then Bhishma vowed never to marry, and to give up his claim to the throne. Satyavati became the wife of Çantanu, and bore him two sons. The oldest of these Bhishma placed, after Çantanu's death, on the throne, and, when he fell in war, he placed the younger son, Vijitravirya, to whom he married two daughters of the king of the Kaçis, a people situated on the Ganges (in the neighbourhood of Varanasi or Benares). But the king died without children. Anxious that the race of Kuru should not die out, Satyavati bade the wise priest Vyasa, the son of her love, whom she had borne before her marriage with Çantanu, raise up children to the two widows of Vijitravirya. When the first widow saw the holy man approach by the light of the lamp, with knots in his hair, with flashing eyes, and bushy brows, she trembled and closed her eyes. The second widow became pale with fear; and so it befell that the son of the first, Dhritarashtra,
That the main portions of the Epos in their present form cannot be older, is clear from the views of the worship of Vishnu and Çiva which prevail in the poem. These forms of worship first obtained currency in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (see below). It is also clear from the identification of Vishnu and Krishna, of Rama and Vishnu; the deeply felt Brahmanic anti-Buddhist tendencies, seen in such a marked manner in the Ramayana; the form of philosophic speculation, and the application of astrology, which are characteristic of the Epos in its present state; and finally from the mention of the Yavanas as the allies of the Kurus, and Dattamira,
"Vishnu-Purana," ed. Wilson, p. 380,
Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 12, Anhang xviii. n. 4.
In the Rigveda we find: "If you, Indra and Agni, are among the Druhyus, Anus or Purus, come forth."
Lassen,
"Rigveda," 1, 31, 4; 1, 31, 17; 7, 18, 13.
According to the Brahmanic recension of the poem which we now possess, Samvarana is able to obtain the daughter of the god only by the mediation of a sacred priest. The king therefore bethinks him of Vasishtha, who ascends to the god of light and obtains his daughter for the king. Lassen, "Ind. Alterth." 12, Anhang xxvi.
