Lectures on the Ancient History of India

by D R Bhandarkar

  We thus see that an Aryan tribe called Pāṇḍu went southwards, and occupied the southernmost part of the peninsula, where they were known as Pāṇḍya and their capital Madhurā or Mathurā. But the story of the migrations of this enterprising Aryan tribe does not end here. We have to note that there is a third Matura in Ceylon, and also a fourth Madura in the Eastern Archipelago.20 The natural conclusion is that the Pāṇḍyas did not rest satisfied with occupying the extremest southern part of the peninsula, but went farther southward and colonised Ceylon also. For, as just stated, the Pāṇḍyas no doubt appear to have come from Mathura, the capital of the Śaurasena country as told by Megasthenes, because this alone can explain why they gave the name Mathurā to the capital of their new kingdom situated at the south end of India. And the fact that we have another Mathurā in Ceylon shows that the Pāṇḍyas alone could go there and have a third capital of this name. Besides, as the Pāṇḍyas occupied the southern extremity of India, it was they who could naturally be expected to go and settle themselves in Ceylon. But they seem to have gone there, not from the Madurā but from the Tinnevelly District. I have told you that the ancient name of Ceylon was Tāmraparṇi, but we have to remember that Tāmraparṇi was the name of a river also.21 This doubtless is the present river Tāmraparṇi in the Tinnevelly District. Scholars have no doubt tacitly admitted that there was a connection somehow between this river and Ceylon, but this connection can be rendered intelligible only on the supposition that the Tinnevelly District was called Tāmraparṇi after the river, just as Sindhu or Sind was after the river Sindhu or Indus. In that case it is intelligible that when the Pāṇḍyas went to Ceylon, they named it Tāmraparṇi after the country they left. Again, coming as they did from the Tinnevelly District they would naturally land in the north-western part of the Island. And it is quite in keeping with this supposition that we find the ancient civilised and populous district of Ceylon, the so-called Kalah located, not in the south, east or north-east, but north-west part of the Island.22

  Let us now see how the Aryan colonisation of Southern India must have been accomplished. We know that when the Aryans migrated in ancient times from Afghānistān and Punjāb to the different parts of Northern India, they did so under the leadership of the Kshatriya tribes, and hence their new settlements were called after the names of those tribes. A curious legend in this connection is worth quoting from the Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa, from which it would appear that when the Aryans pushed forward to the east of the Sarasvatī, they were led by Māthava the Videgha, and his priest.23 They went at first as far east as the Sadānīrā which formed the boundary between Kośala and Videha and which therefore corresponds to the Little Gaṇḍak of the present day.24 For some time they did not venture to cross this river. They did however cross it, and, at the time when the Śatapatha-Brāhmaṇa was composed, were settled to the east of it in a province called Videha no doubt after the name of the tribe to which the king Māthava belonged. Nay, we have got Pāṇini’s authority to that effect; thus, according to him, Pañchālānāṁ nivāso janapadaḥ Pāñchālaḥ, i.e. the word Pāñchālaḥ denotes the country or kingdom which the Kshatriya tribe Pañchāla occupied. What happened in North India must have happened in South India also. I have already referred to the tribe Pāṇḍu who were settled in the southernmost part of India and after whom it was called Pāṇḍyā. This was certainly a Kshatriya tribe. Again, we have a passage in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, viz. Dāṇḍakyo nāma Bhojaḥ kāmāt Brāhmaṇa-kanyām=abhimanyamānas=sa-bandhu-rāshṭro vinanāśa (a Bhoja known as Dāṇḍakya or king of Daṇḍakā, making a lascivous attempt on a Brāhmaṇ girl, perished along with his relations and kingdom.)25 Bhoja was, of course, the name of a Kshatriya tribe, as we know from the Mahābhārata and Harivaṁśa.26 And a prince of this tribe is here said to have been a ruler of Daṇḍakā, which is another name for Mahārāshṭra.27 As all the incidents which Kauṭilya mentions along with that of Dāṇḍakya Bhoja took place long before his time and as he himself was, we know, the prime-minister of Chandragupta, founder of the Maurya dynasty, and consequently lived at the close of the fourth century B.C., it appears that the Bhojas must have taken possession of Mahārāshṭra, at least in the fifth century B.C., if not earlier. I have already told you that the Buddhist work Suttanipāta speaks of Patiṭṭhāna or Paiṭhaṇ in Nizam’s Dominions. But there was an older Patiṭṭhāna or Pratishṭhāna on the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumnā, which was the capital of Aila Purūravas.28 The practice of naming the younger town after the older one is universal, and is well-known even in the colonies of European nations. I have already quoted you an instance from India, viz. of Mathurā. And Pratishṭhāna is but another instance. It thus seems that on the bank of the Godāvarī we had a colony from the country of which the older Pratishṭhāna was the capital, and it is probable that we had here a colony of the Aila tribe.29 Even as late as the third century A.D., we find North Indian Aryan tribes or families going southwards and settling themselves somewhere in Southern India. A Buddhist stūpa has been discovered at Jagayyapeṭa in the Kistnā District, Madras. We have got here at least three inscriptions of this period which refer themselves to the reign of the king Māḍharīputra Śrī-Vīrapurushadatta of the Ikshvāku family.30 This indicates that the Kistnā and adjoining Districts were held in the third century A.D. by the Ikshvākus,31 who certainly must have come from the north. we know that Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, belonged to the Ikshvāku race. So did Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The Ikshvākus are also mentioned in the Purāṇas as a historical royal dynasty ruling in North India. The Ikshvākus of the Kistnā District must, therefore, have come from the north.

  It is true that the Aryan civilisation was thus to a certain extent spread over Southern India through conquest. But this cannot be the whole cause. Causes of a pacific and more important nature must also have operated. We are so much accustomed to hear about the enterprising and prosylitising spirit of the Buddhist and Jaina monks that we are apt to think that Brahmanism had never shown any missionary zeal. Is this, however, a fact? Did not the Brāhmaṇs or at any rate any of the hymn-composing families put forth any missionary effort and help in the dissemination of the Aryan culture I cannot help thinking that the ancient Ṛishis were not mere passive inert thinkers, but were active though not aggressive propagators of their faith? Tradition, narrated in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, says that it was the Brāhmaṇ sage Agastya who first crossed the Vindhya range and led the way to the Aryan immigration.32 “When Rāma began his southward march and was at Pañchavaṭī, Agastya was already to the south of the Vindhyas and was staying in a hermitage about two yojanas from it. This is not all. We find him evermore penetrating farther and farther into the hitherto unknown south, and civilising the Dravidians. Nay, this is admitted by the Tamiḷ people themselves. They make Agastya the founder of their language and literature and call him by way of eminence the Tamiṛmuni or Tamiḷian sage. They still point to a mountain in the Tinnevelly District, which is commonly called by the English Agastier,—i.e. Agastya’s hill—of “Agastya being supposed to have finally retired thither from the world after civilising the Dravidians.”33 I am not unaware that these are legends. It is however, a mistake to suppose that legends teach us nothing historical. It may very well be doubted whether Agastya as he figures in these legends is a historical personality. But a man is certainly lacking the historical sense if he cannot read in these legends the historical truth that Ṛishis took a most prominent but unobtrusive part in the Aryan colonisation and the diffusion of Aryan culture. The old Ṛishis of India, I think, were as enthusiastic and enterprising in this respect as the Buddhist and Jaina missionaries, and were often migrating with their host of pupils to distant countries. I shall take only one instance. I hope you remember the Brāhmaṇs, guru Bāvarin, whom I mentioned a few minutes ago. His story appears in the Sutta-Nipāta. He is described therein as perfect in the three Vedas. He has sixteen disciples—all Brāhmaṇ
s, and each one of them again had his host of pupils. They all bore matted hair and sacred skins, and are styled Ṛishis. With these pupils of his and their pupils’ pupils Bāvarin was settled on the hank of the Godāvarī in the Aśmaka territory, where he performed a sacrifice. He was thus settled on the confines of the Dakshiṇāpatha, as it was then known, if not beyond. And yet we are told that originally he was at Śrāvastī, capital of the Kośala country. He and his pupils had thus traversed at least 600 miles before they came and were settled on the Godāvarī. It will thus be seen that the Ṛishis were in the habit of moving in large numbers and to long distances, and making their settlements where they performed sacrifices. This is exactly in keeping with what we gather from the Rāmāyaṇa. To the south of the Vindhya, we learn there were many Brāhmaṇ anchorites who lived in hermitages at different places and performed their sacrifices before Rāma penetrated Daṇḍakāraṇya and commenced his career of conquest. There was an aboriginal tribe called the Rākshasas who disturbed the sacrifices and devoured the hermits and thus placed themselves in hostile opposition to the Brahmanical institutions. On the other hand, under the designation of Vānaras, we have got another class of aborigines, who allied themselves to the Brāhmaṇs and embraced their form of religious worship. Even among the Rākshasas we know we had an exception in Vibhīshaṇa, brother of Rāvaṇa, who is said to be na tu Rākshasa-cheshṭitaḥ,34 not behaving himself like a Rākshasa. This was the state of things in Southern India when Rāma came there. This clearly shows that the Ṛishis were always to the forefront in the work of colonising Southern India and introducing Aryan civilisation. Amongst them Agastya was the only Ṛishi, who fought with the Rākshasas and killed them. The other Ṛishis, like true missionaries, never resorted to the practice of retaliation, though they believed rightly or wrongly that they had the power of ridding themselves of their enemy. One of them distinctly says to Rāma: Kāmaṁ tapaḥ-prabhāveṇa śaktā hantum niśācharān chirārjitaṁ na chechchhāmastapah khaṇḍayitum vayaṁ: “It is true that by the power of our austerities we could at will slay these goblins; but we are unwilling to nullify (the merit of) our austerities.”35 And it was simply because through genuine missionary spirit the Ṛishis refused to practice retaliation that Rāma, like a true Kshatriya, intervened and waged war with the Rākshasas. This high noble spirit of the ancient Ṛishis, manifested in their mixing with the aborigines and civilising them, is not seen from the Rāmāyaṇa only. It may also be seen from the story of the fifty of Viśvāmitra’s sons, mentioned in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa and referred to at the beginning of this lecture. They strongly disapproved of his adoption of Śunaḥśepa, and were for that reason cursed by Viśvāmitra to live on the borders of the Aryan settlements. And their progeny, we are told, are the Andhras, Puṇḍras, Śabaras and so forth. If we read the legend aright, it clearly indicates that even the scions of such an illustrious hymn-composing family as that of Viśvāmitra migrated southward boldly, and what is more, married and mixed freely with the aborigines, with the object of diffusing Aryan culture amongst them.

  But by what routes did the Aryans penetrate South India? This question we have now to consider. The main route, I think, is the reverse of the one by which Bāvarin’s pupils went to Magadha from Aśmaka. This was described a short time ago. The Aryan route thus seems to have lain through the Avanti country, the southernmost town of which was Māhissatī or Māndhātā on the Narmadā, from where the Aryans crossed the Vindhyas and penetrated Southern India. They began by colonising Vidarbha from which they proceded southwards first to the Muḷaka territory with its principal town Patiṭṭhāna or Paiṭhaṇ and from there to the Aśmaka country. By what route farther southward they immigrated is not clear, but the find-spots of Aśoka’s inscriptions perhaps afford a clue. One copy of his Minor Rock Edicts has been found at Maski in the Lingsugur Taluq of the Raichur District, Nizām’s Dominions,36 and three more farther southward, in the Chitaldrug District of the Mysore State.37 A few Jaina cave inscriptions have come to light also in the Madurā District38 and appear to belong to the second century B.C. and possibly earlier. As Aśoka’s edicts and these cave inscriptions are in Pāli, these certainly were the districts colonised by the Aryans. The Aryans thus seem to have gone south from the Aśmaka territory through the modern Raichur and Chitaldrug Districts, from where they must have gone to the Madurā District which was originally in the Pāṇḍya kingdom. This seems to agree with the tradition of their immigration preserved among the Tamiḷ Brāhmaṇs. These Brāhmaṇs have a section called Bṛihachcharaṇa which means the Great Immigration, and must refer to a large southward movement.39 They are subdivided into Mazhnāḍu and Molagu. The Mazhnāḍu sub-section is further divided into Kandra-māṇikkam, Mangudi and Sathia-mangalam etc., all villages along the Western Ghāṭs— showing that in their southward movement they clung to the highlands and peopled the skirts of the present province of Mysore and the Coimbatore and Madurā Districts— a conclusion which agrees with that just drawn from the find-spots of the Aśoka and Cave Inscriptions in Southern India.

  Another route by which the Aryans seem to have gone to South India was by the sea. They appear to have sailed from the Indus to Kachchha, and from there by sea-coast to Surāshṭra or Kāṭhiāwāṛ, from Kāṭhiāwāṛ to Bharukachchha or modern Broach, and from Bharukachchha to Suppāraka or Sopārā in the Ṭhāṇā District of the Bombay Presidency. Baudhāyana, the author of a Dharmaśāstra quotes a verse from the Bhāllavin School of Law, which tells us that the inhabitants of Sindhu, Sauvira and Surāshṭra like those of the Dekkan were of mixed origin. This shows that the Aryans had begun colonising those parts. Towards the end of the period we have selected they seem to have advanced as far south as Sopārā. But as already stated they must have gone by the sea-route, because it is quite clear that no mention is traceable of any inland countries or towns between the sea-coast and the Dekkan.40

  Now, wherever in India and Ceylon the Aryans penetrated, they introduced not only their civilisation, i.e. their religion, culture and social organisation, but also imposed their language on the aborigines. It is scarcely necessary for me to expatiate on the former point, for it is an indisputable fact that the Hindu civilisation that we see everywhere in India or Ceylon is essentially Aryan. You know about it as much and as well as I do. This point, therefore, calls for no remarks. In regard to the Aryan language, however, I cannot do better than quote the following opinion of Sir George Grierson, an eminent linguist of the present day. “When an Aryan tongue,” says he, “comes into contact with an uncivilized aboriginal one, it is invariably the latter which goes to the wall. The Aryan does not attempt to speak it, and the necessities of intercourse compelled the aborigine to use a broken ‘pigeon’ form of the language of a superior civilisation. As generations pass this mixed jargon more and more approximates to its model, and in process of time the old aboriginal language is forgotten and dies a natural death.”41 I completely endorse this view of Sir George Grierson except in one respect. This exception, you will at once see, is the Dravidian languages which are at present spoken in Southern India. It is, indeed, strange how the Aryan failed to supplant the Dravidian speech in this part of India, though it most successfully did in Northern India, where I have no doubt the Dravidian tongue prevailed before the advent of the Aryans. This will be seen from the fact that “Brahuī, the language of the mountaineers in the Khanship of Kelat in Beluchistan, contains not only some Dravidian words, but a considerable infusion of distinctively Dravidian forms and idioms”.42 The discovery of this Dravidian element in a language spoken beyond the Indus tends to show that the Dravidians, like the Aryans, the Scythians, and so forth, must have entered India by the north-western route. It is also a well-known fact, accepted by all scholars, that there are many Sanskrit words, which are really Dravidian, and Kittel, in his Kannaḍa-English Dictionary, gives a long list of them. But in compiling this list he seems to have drawn exclusively upon classical Sanskrit, which was never a bh
āshā or spoken language. At least one Dravidian word, however, is known from the Vedic literature, which is admitted to be composed in the language actually spoken by the people. The word I mean is maṭachī which occurs in the Chhāndogya-Upanishad (1.10.1) in the passage maṭachī-hateshu Kurushu āṭikyā saha jāyayā Ushastir=ha Chākrāyaṇa ibhya-grāme pradrāṇaka uvāsa. Here evidently the devastation of the crops in the Kuru country by maṭachī is spoken of. All the commentators except one have wrongly taken maṭachī to mean ‘hailstones’, but one commentator who is an exception rightly gives rakta-varṇāḥ kshudra-pakshi-viśeshā as an alternative equivalent.43 This shows that these “red-coloured winged creatures” can be no other than locusts, and that it is they which laid waste the fields of the Kuru country as they do to the present day in every part of India. It is interesting to note that this explanation of the commentator is confirmed by the fact that maṭachī is a Sanskritised form of the well-known Canarese word miḍiche which is explained by Kittel’s Dictionary as “a grasshopper, a locust” and which is used in this sense to this day in the Dhārwār District of the Bombay Presidency.44 Scholars are unanimous on the point that the Chhāndogya-Upanishad is one of the earliest of the Upanishads. Nobody doubts that this Upanishad was put together in the North of India, especially in the Punjāb, and that the Sanskrit language in which it is composed represents the current speech of the day. And yet we find in it a term which is a genuinely Dravidian word. I have no doubt that more such will be forthcoming from the Vedic literature if scholars of the Dravidian languages undertake this task. And this will confirm the conclusion that the Dravidian tongue was prevalent in North India before the Aryans came and occupied it. The same conclusion is forced upon us by an examination of the vernaculars of North India, Take Bengali, for instance; the words Khokā and Khukī which mean ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ in Bengali are nothing but the Oraon Kokā and Kokī. The Bengali telo, ‘head’, is the Telugu Tā-lai and Tamiḷ Nolā, ‘tongue’ is Tamiḷ nālu. The plural suffix gul is used in Tamiḷ to denote ‘many’. Gulī and gulā are used for the same purpose in Bengali. Instances can be multiplied,45 but those given are enough, to show that even the vernacular Bengali, which bristles with Sanskrit and derivative words, is indebted to Dravidian languages for a pretty large portion of its vocabulary and structural peculiarities. What is strange is that even in Hindī speech Dravidian words have been traced. Even the commonest Hindī words jhagṛā, āṭā and so forth have been traced to Dravidian vocables.46 No reasonable doubt can therefore be entertained as to the Dravidian speech once being spoken in North India.