Study on the Geography and the Primitive Populations of North-West India According to the Vedic Hymns Preceded by an Overview of the Current State of Studies on Ancient India
by M. Vivien De Saint-Martin
1855
Translated [Google translate] from the French original
[Etuden Sur La Geographie Et Les Populations Primitives Du Nord-Ouest De L'Inde D'Apres Les Hymnes Vediques Precedee D'Un Apercu De L'Etat Actuel Des Etudes Sur L'Inde Ancienne, by Par M. Vivien De Saint-Martin, 1855]
There are also a few WORKS professing to DEAL WITH GEOGRAPHY. Mr. Wilford has long ago pointed out (Asiatick Researches, XIV. pp. 374-380), the existence of the following:— (1) Munja-pratidesa [x]-vyavastha, (2) Bhoja-pratidesa-vyavastha (a revised edition of 1), (3) Bhuvana-Sagara, (4) A Geography written at the command of Bukkaraya, (5) A commentary on the Geography of the Mahabharata written by order of the Raja of Paulastya (?Paurastya?) by a Pandit in the time of Hussein Shah (1489) — a voluminous work. A MS. acquired by Mr. Wilford once formed a part of the Library of Fort William College: it is now in the Government Sanskrit College Library, Calcutta. A detailed description,* [Gazetteer literature in Sanskrit.] of this MS. has been given by M.M.H.P. Sastri in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society (1919). Prof. Pulle has mentioned (in pp 13-15 in his Studi Italiani di Filologia Indo-lranica, vol IV.) the existence of the following geographical works in the Library of the Nazionale centrale di Firenze (Florence, in Italy):— (5) Lokapraksa ([x]) of Kshemendra (the celebrated Kasmirian writer): the MS. consists of 782 pages and it is profusely illustrated. Prof Pulle has reproduced two of its figures in his Studi. (6) Three MSS. of Kshetra Samasa, a Jaina work — with two different commentaries, (7) A MS. of Kshetra Samasa Prakarana, (8) Four MSS. of Samgha- yani of Chandrasuri with two commentaries: one of the MSS. is illustrated, (9) A Laghu-Samghayani. He has also pointed out the mention of Kshetra Samasa of Jina Bhadra (1457-1517) in Kielhorn's Report (1880-1), of (10) Loghu Kshetra Samasa of Ratnasekhara in Weber's Cat. (No. 1942), of (11) Trailokya dipika and (12) Trailokya Darpana quoted by Wilford. Besides the above, (13) a Jama Tittha Kappa, and (14) Tristhaliactu dealing with the topography of Prayaga are also known.
St Martin [de Louis vivien de Saint-Martin] [Etat actuel des etudes sur l'Inde ancienne, p. xiii. (Google translate: Current state of studies on ancient India)] characterized the works mentioned by Wilford to be "imposture literature" without sufficiently examining them. Be they "imposture" or not, they have not yet been sufficiently examined.[!!!]
-- Cunningham's Ancient Geography of India, Edited With Introduction and Notes by Surendranath Majumdar Shastri, M.A., Premchand Raychand Scholar, Reader, Patna University, 1924
PRELIMINARY NOTE.
The program proposed in 1849 by the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres for the restitution of the ancient geography of India according to the sources, from primitive times to the time of the Muselman invasion, has occasion of the current study on the Geography of the Veda.
This study embraces only a part of the vast subject pointed out by the Academy; but it is its fundamental basis. The precious collection of Vedic hymns, since the works, still so recent, of Rosen, Langlois, Max Muller and Wilson, gave us access to it, has become the necessary starting point for all research relating to ancient India, as much for history and geography as for social and religious development.
Leaving aside philological exegesis, a task for which M. Max Muller, the learned editor of the text, is appointed above all others, there are in the Veda two great subjects of study.
One can seek there the picture of society itself and of its religious ideas, as well as the relations of these primitive beliefs with those of the other peoples of the great Indo-European family.
Or can focus more specifically on the geography and ethnographic indications contained in the hymns.
The subject which was given to us touched, to tell the truth, neither worship nor social development. We have not had to approach this great side of Vedic studies, of which M. Guigniaut has just given such a fine exposition in his course at the College de France. A book that the learned German will envy us will, we hope, come out of these learned lessons, and it is up to the eminent professor to endow science with it.
Restricted to geography and ethnography, the double object of our researches did not fail, in its less extended horizon, to have great importance. On the one hand, it is the determination of the geographical synonymes which fixes in a certain way the limits of what one can call the Vedic territory, that is to say the country where the Arian tribes lived during the long period to which the composition of the hymns relates; on the other hand, synonymes and ethnological filiations lead to results of great consequence for the history of India. Their light is projected not only on the heroic centuries which the great poems celebrate, but also on all the sequence of later times up to the present time.
We know how important ethnological studies are for clarifying the origins and migrations of peoples, and for giving their true meaning to certain historical events; for India especially, which has no written history in the strict sense of the word, this importance is greater than anywhere else. In several essential respects, they are history itself. Combined with the indications that scholarly criticism can draw from the old monuments of Sanskrit literature, they make it possible to reconstruct, in the absence of details of events, at least some major phases of social history. We believe that the current memoir will already be able to give an idea of the historical scope of this type of research; but it is in a special work that we propose later to embrace the detail and bring out all the consequences.
If the study of the various races of a great country such as India is the essential basis of history, ethnological research must itself be based on geography. So it was to Sanskrit geography that our first work had to be devoted. It was a truly immense field of investigation, which we found almost uncultivated. Ten years of almost uninterrupted application have barely sufficed to explore all its parts. We nevertheless dare to believe that historical and archaeological researches will find a solid point of support in the very extensive work which we have devoted to the ancient geography of India. Of the four memoirs of which this work is composed, two have just been printed in one of the Collections of the Academy of Inscriptions, and we hope that the printing of the other two will follow shortly. Our Memoir on the route of Hiouen-Thsang, in the seventh-sixth century of our era, forms the natural complement of these four pieces of ancient geography, as well as the Study on Vedic geography, which we are now delivering to the impression, is its starting point and introduction.
Except for a few retouches and a few additions of no importance, we give the present memoir absolutely as it was submitted, in 1855, to the judgment of the Academy.
July 1859
Introduction.
General view of the History and Geography of India up to the end of the Muslim period, preceded by an outline of the present state of studies on ancient India.
The conquest of India by the Muslims marks the time when, for the first time, native place names underwent profound alterations; these alterations have been perpetuated to the present day, worsening from century to century under foreign influences, and they have ended by erasing and rendering almost entirely unrecognizable the Sanskrit nomenclature of the peninsula, that is to say the true national geography, the only one which gives an understanding of the ancient monuments of Indian literature. To restore, according to the sources, the geography of India prior to the Muslim conquest1 [These are the terms of the program proposed as a prize subject, in 1849, by the Academy of Inscriptions, and extended in 1851.] it is a problem which opens to geographical science one of the vastest fields of investigation that it can propose today.
And we can also say one of the most useful. After having remained, until the end of the last century, almost completely outside the studies which had for their object the antiquities of Asia, India has since then taken a large part in it, which acquires more and more importance every day, and more scope. Very slow at first and much disputed, the progress of this new branch of Oriental studies has become, for twenty-five years, both more rapid and more sure. Already, in this still quite recent career, great scientific notabilities have occurred, and they have marked their passage through it by vast and fine works. The names of William Jones, of Wilkins, of CoIebrooke and of Thomas Prinsep in Calcutta, of Wilson in England, of Gorresio in Italy, of Eugène Burnouf, of Langlois and of Adolphe Régnier in France, of Schlegel, of Benfey, of Lassen, of Max Muller, of Kuhn, of Albrecht Weber in Germany, to cite only the most illustrious, throw on this new school a brilliance which is due no less to the importance of the results acquired than to the eminent qualities of erudition and sagacity which these names recall.
Works relating to India have, moreover, followed, in their course and in their successive developments, the order which emerged from the subject itself, and which was imposed by the more or less easy access to documents and sources. The Sanskrit language, whose very name was unknown barely a century ago, must have been its first object, then literature, then finally antiquities and scholarly research. As we have been able to penetrate further into the immense domain of Brahmanic literature, as new texts have been acquired and published, we have seen the horizon expand and unexpected perspectives open up. Currently a great work of reconstitution takes place. Of literature properly so called, we possess almost all the important monuments. Buddhist India was revealed to us by the work of Eugène Burnouf, which was interrupted too soon, alas! by premature death; Colebrooke and the scholars who have followed in his footsteps have made us penetrate into the intimate knowledge of the philosophical doctrines which developed very anciently in this land of abstract contemplation; the Vedas and the ancient literature related to them are now the object of similar studies, of which we already have important results: in a word, we see rising for us from his secular sepulchre, under the powerful evocation of our European scholars, the entire old Hindu society, with its religious, philosophical and moral doctrines. Efforts are now turning to history.
Here the materials are fewer and the difficulties greater. At no time did Brahmanic India have a proper history. The memory of ancient things has only been preserved among the Indians in the vast Puranic compilations, where legend and real facts are often mixed and difficult to separate. To bring together the versions, often very numerous, of the same story, in order to go back to the primitive text, which is, in general, the simplest and the purest; compare all the legends, in order to extract from their alloy the real facts which were the starting point; to collect all the lists of princes, all the genealogies contained in the great poems, in the Puranas and in other sources; to examine and discuss this infinite detail of more or less altered facts and uncertain names, while enlightening oneself with external help furnished by the peoples with whom India found itself in contact from the fourth century before our era; to finally reconstruct, at the cost of this laborious amount of discussion and research, a regular set where the facts are re-established at least in their general relationships: this is a task that cannot be accomplished either in a single day or by a single man. We are, moreover, still very far, in spite of the activity of research and the publication of texts, from possessing in Europe all the materials necessary for this great reconstruction. When one thinks that ten generations of scholars have worn themselves out on the much less abundant texts from which, since the time of the Renaissance, the historical and literary antiquity of the Greek and Roman world has been unearthed, one is less impatient of what remains to be done for India than amazed at what has already been done. The great work on which Mr. Lassen has been working for twenty years, and of which he has so far given three volumes, independently of several particular memoirs, is in itself a veritable monument of Indian erudition. The Antiquities of India (Indische Alterthumskunde) by the famous Bonn professor is perhaps not the last word in the reconstruction of ancient India; but the work will always remain as one of the finest titles of the Indianist school, and it will surely be for a long time to come the most complete repertoire of historical notions that can be drawn from Hindu sources.
In this set of recent publications on Brahmanic India, geography had lagged far behind. Many particular points have been touched upon in some of the great works which Europe has seen appear for twenty years, especially in those of M. Wilson and M. Lassen; there are indications of detail and happy comparisons; a great number of facts and identifications can also be drawn from the innumerable memoirs scattered in the special journals and in the academic collections of India and Europe: but, until now, the subject had not been approached in a work together. This work, which alone can reconstitute in a regular body the Sanskrit geography of India, became however each day of a more urgent necessity; there is not a question of history or archaeology where this necessity does not make itself keenly felt. The first condition in any research of this nature is to be firmly fixed on the theater of events; otherwise the texts bring to mind only a floating and confused image.
Studies on the geography of ancient India have long been limited to the notions provided by Greek and Latin writers. Until the end of the last century, Sanskrit India did not yet exist. We knew of the past of this great peninsula only what our own classical authors have transmitted to us, according to the original historians of Alexander the Great and his immediate successors, and also according to the relations of which the commercial relations of Roman Egypt with the East became the occasion. The researches of d'Anville (1783 and 1775), the first who seriously attempted to bring together classical indications with modern notions; those of Rennell (1783 to 1793), of Mannert (1797), of Wahl (1805), of Dr. Vincent (1807) and of M. Gossellin (1789 to 1813), did not come out of this circle. Already, however, in his discourses on the sciences and literature of the Asiatic nationalities, William Jones, the famous founder of the Bengal Society, had hinted at the unknown resources which Brahmanical literature could furnish for the study of ancient India, and he had endeavored, not without success, to carry the English Orientalists in this direction. In 1801, in the sixth volume of Asiatic Researches1 [Introd. p. iv.], the Asiatic Society of Calcutta reported among the desiderata of Indian studies "a Catalog of the names of towns, countries, provinces, rivers and mountains taken from the Castras and the Puranas, with the correspondence of modern names." It asked also research on this question both historical and geographical: "What were the geographical and political divisions of the country before the Muslim invasion?" What the Society demanded from then on was nothing less than the complete restitution of the Sanskrit geography of India. But this task, if it was not beyond the strength of those who found themselves in a position to undertake it, exceeded the resources with which such an enterprise could then surround itself; for studies of comparative geography must be based above all on complete knowledge of the locality, and the topographical survey of the peninsula was barely begun at that time.
Colonel Wilford was unfortunately the only member of the Calcutta Society who entered into this direction of geographical research pointed out by William Jones. Wilford was read and zealous; and, if he had been endowed with a critical sense, which he entirely lacked, he could have rendered real service to Indian studies. But the incredible aberrations to which he so often lets himself be carried away (not to mention the literary impostures of his pundits, of which he was the first victim), remove all serious value from his works, and only allow the facts to be received with extreme reserve, and reconciliations, which have not been audited by other authorities.
A far more promising approach to the problem, indeed a short cut, seemed to be heralded in a letter to Jones from Lieutenant Francis Wilford, a surveyor and an enthusiastic student of all things oriental, who was based at Benares. Jones had been sent copies of inscriptions found at Ellora and written in Ashoka Brahmi, the still undeciphered pin-men. He had probably sent them to Wilford because Benares, the holy city of the Hindus, was the most likely place to find a Brahmin who might be able to read them. In 1793 Wilford announced that he had found just such a man:
"I have the honour to return to you the facsimile of several inscriptions with an explanation of them. I despaired at first of ever being able to decipher them... However, after many fruitless attempts on our part, we were so fortunate as to find at last an ancient sage, who gave us the key, and produced a book in Sanskrit, containing a great many ancient alphabets formerly in use in different parts of India. This was really a fortunate discovery, which hereafter may be of great service to us."
According to the ancient sage, most of Wilford's inscriptions related to the wanderings of the five heroic Pandava brothers from the Mahabharata. At the unspecified time in question they were under an obligation not to converse with the rest of mankind; so their friends devised a method of communicating with them by "writing short and obscure sentences on rocks and stones in the wilderness and in characters previously agreed upon betwixt them." The sage happened to have the key to these characters in his code book; obligingly he transcribed them into Devanagari Sanskrit and then translated them.
To be fair to Wilford, he was a bit suspicious about this ingenious explanation of how the inscriptions got there. But he had no doubts that the deciphering and translation were genuine. "Our having been able to decipher them is a great point in my opinion, as it may hereafter lead to further discoveries, that may ultimately crown our labours with success." Above all, he had now located the code book, "a most fortunate circumstance."
Poor Wilford was the laughing stock of the Benares Brahmins for a whole decade. They had already fobbed him off with Sanskrit texts, later proved spurious, on the source of the Nile and the origin of Mecca. After the code book there was a geographical treatise on The Sacred Isles of the West, which included early Hindu reference to the British Isles. The Brahmins, to whom Sanskrit had so long remained a sacred prerogative, were getting their own back. One wonders how much Wilford paid his "ancient sage."
Jones was already a little suspicious of Wilford's sources, but on the code book, which was as much a fabrication as the translations supposedly based on it, he reserved judgment until he might see it. He never did. In fact it was never heard of again. But in spite of these disappointments Jones continued to believe that in time this oldest script would be deciphered. He had been sent a copy of the writings on the Delhi pillar and told a correspondent that they "drive me to despair; you are right, I doubt not, in thinking them foreign; I believe them to be Ethiopian and to have been imported a thousand years before Christ." It was not one of his more inspired guesses and at the time of his death the mystery of the inscriptions and of the monoliths was as dark as ever.
-- India Discovered, by John Keay
It must, however, be recognized that in the last of his memoirs, which is also the least imperfect (I am not speaking of the posthumous publication, in nos. 220 and 223, 1851; of the Journal of the Society of Calcutta, of a essay in comparative geography which is a work of the worst times of Wilford), it must be recognized, I say, that, in the last of his memoirs, inserted in volume XIV of the Asiatic Researches (1822), and which has for its title On the ancient Geography of India, there are here and there useful indications which have been furnished him principally by treatises on Sanskrit geography of a very modern date, in truth, but which contain none the less, on indigenous nomenclature, more detailed notions than those of European investigators.
In the first forty years of the present century, the comparative geography of Brahmanic India has therefore made only very slight progress. There has been, as I have already said, good work of detail, and useful research on particular points; the publications of Mr. Wilson especially contain excellent material and precious indications, in particular the explanations which he joined to his elegant translation of the Megha Dhoûta of Kalidâsa (1813), his precious Introduction to the Catalog of the Mackenzie collection (1828), and especially the notes of his translation of the Vishnu Pourâna (1840), a veritable encyclopedia of Hindu antiquity. They are good material for some parts of the national geography of India; but, on the whole, nothing has been done or undertaken. The most considerable advance is in the publication of Sanskrit texts, as much in Calcutta as in London, in Paris, in Germany and in Petersburg, and in the already numerous translations of the original works. The impulse is given and does not slow down. As for the general state of Sanskrit geography before the labors of Mr. Lassen, if we wish to have an idea of the quite rudimentary condition in which it was still reduced barely twenty years ago, we must go through the sketch drawn by Mr. Carl Ritter of the geography of the Hindu peninsula prior to the Muslim conquest1 [Erdkunds, t. V, 1835, p. 434 to 529.]: the learned geographer of Berlin, who, for this portion of his book as for all the others, has read everything, consulted everything, quoted everything, barely registers here and there an ancient Sanskrit name related to the current names, after Wilford, Franklin, William Jones or Wilson. Walter Hamilton's Description of India (1820), the fullest that England still possesses, is no richer in this respect, although the author, from a just sense of the vice of the European nomenclature, has everywhere sought to bring back to their Sanskrit form the horribly corrupt names of our maps and our books.
The great work of M. Lassen1 [Indische Alterthumskunmde, t. I-III, 1847-1857, gr. in-8.], and the particular memoirs which were the preparation2 [De Pentapotamia indica, 1827, in-4; From Taprobane insula, 1842, in-4; Beitrage zur Kunde des indischen Alterthums aus dem Mahabharata, in the Zeitscrift fur die Kunde des Morgenlands, t. I a V, 1837-1844, etc.], mark an immense progress in the study of ancient Sanskrit geography, or, to put it better, they are the true starting point of this study; It must, however, be recognized that it is only very incidental in the work of the famous professor. M. Lassen is incessantly brought back to it in the course of his historical researches, because the ground where they place it is, in this respect, almost absolutely uncultivated, and because the knowledge of the localities is indispensable to the clarification of the facts. But he did not address the subject as a whole. He did not attempt to trace its historical development; and it is even true to say that, however numerous the geographical explanations contained in his notes, they scarcely touch more than the principal points and historical localities, thus leaving out a multitude of ancient names given by the texts and by inscriptions. These detailed identifications would have led the author into a series of discussions that his plan did not include. The map drawn up for the Antiquities of India, by M. Henri Kiepert (1853), has precisely the same character. This map has the great merit of being, in this genre, the first serious attempt; but, as the geographer has included only the data furnished by the work of M. Lassen, it presents, on the whole, only a very incomplete and very sparse nomenclature. It is a canvas in which one recognizes the hand of the master, but it is only a canvas; Mr. Lassen was doubtless better than anyone in a position to undertake thoroughly the complete study of the ancient geography of India. If his researches had turned especially in this direction, I would not have had the presumption to approach after him a subject so vast and so difficult.
At least I will not have neglected anything so as not to remain too below this crushing task. I did not hide the extent of it from myself, nor do I think that I am accused of having exaggerated it. The number of sources to consult is immense; I have endeavored not to omit any of them. For discussions of comparative geography and historical ethnology, there is no too careful research; and it often happens that we come across, in the accounts of the least scientific character, facts and indications which we have sought in vain in the more special sources. As the task of the geographer is to see the country through the eyes of others, the witnesses who serve as his intermediaries cannot be too numerous nor too diverse in disposition, so that all together complement and control each other. Good topographical maps are also an indispensable element, and, in this respect, the great atlas of the Compagnie des Indes, which is in the process of being executed, has often been of precious help in spite of its recognized imperfections. It would be useless to dwell any longer here on the sources of all the periods that I had to draw on, having taken care to cite them exactly throughout the course of my research, and my intention being to give later a complete bibliography of the peninsula, of which I gathered all the elements a long time ago. Anyone who has been involved in research of this nature will not find the care I have given to this part of the subject, indicated by the program of the Academy, too scrupulous.
It is now appropriate to take a general look at ancient India, in order to recognize the great epochs between which its geographical history is divided. This distinction by era is all the more necessary since they each have their own, well-defined character, and since their study is generally based on a series of quite distinct documents. There are necessary relations between them and a reciprocal dependence, as between the parts of the same body, and it would be impossible to study one of them in depth if we isolated it completely from the others; but they nevertheless form so many natural sections, which can only be deepened by approaching them separately. It is in the aftermath of these great epochs that we also see the history of ancient Hindu society and the successive phases of its development unfold.
What may be called the primitive times of India are those to which the Veda belongs. We know that the Veda is the religious book of the Arian race of India, that is, of the people whose language was Sanskrit; the principal part of this sacred collection, the Rig-Veda, is composed of hymns sung by the priests during the offerings made to the protective gods of the Aryas. These hymns, all except the last in the collection, belong to a time when the Aryas, divided into tribes, still led pastoral life in the plains of Punjab (the Vedic Sapta-Sindhu, or the region of the Seven Rivers); they are, consequently, prior to the establishment of the Arian nation in the plains of the Yamounâ and the Ganges, and to the beginning of the great monarchies which were founded there under the two contemporary races of Tchandra and Sourya (the Lunar race and the Solar race). The period of Vedic times, during which the hymns were composed, certainly embraces a space of several centuries; and, without claiming to assign its precise limits, one can at least admit as extremely probable that it pivots around the fifteenth century before the Christian era. The Veda is by no means a historical book, although there are found in it, in considerable number, facts and traditions which are the oldest memories of the race, and which later became the basis of a host of legends contained in the great poems and in the Puranas; but, from this particular point of view of the history of the Aryas, it is above all because of its geographical indications that the collection of hymns is important. One can even say, without exaggerating anything, that it is the geography of the hymns which gives them a real historical value; for it is by this alone that one fixes with certainty the residence of the Arian tribes at that time, and that one can recognize their progressive market from Sindhou to the Ganges. There are only two or three names of territories in the Veda; but the names of the tribes, Arian or non-Arian, are quite numerous there. The clarification of this part of the Vedic indications is of great importance; it is the starting point of the ethnology of northern India, and a solid basis for its heroic history.
It is to this double object, the clarification of the geography and ethnography of the Veda, that the present work is devoted.
With the establishment of the great Arian monarchies in the basin of the Ganges begins a second period, which may be called that of the heroic times. The initial epoch of this second period must most probably be placed from the fourteenth to the twelfth century, before our era. It embraces, like the Vedic period, a space of at least five or six centuries; but the events which fill it have a much greater character, and they have also had quite a different repercussion in Brahmanical literature. These ancient times, during which two great parallel dynasties shared the empire of the Gangetic countries, lived in traditions as the glorious era of national history. If India had had its Herodotus or its Livy, this period in the history of the Aryas would have provided some beautiful pages in the annals of humanity. A nation which is transformed and begins a new life, which abandons the pastoral life for the better regulated habits of agricultural life, and which receives from its Sages a political, civil and religious organization, strong enough to have gone through three thousand years of fortunes diverse, and not having allowed itself to be undermined either by schisms, or by revolutions, or by conquest, such a nation, at the time of its youthful energy, would have been a noble and grand spectacle for history. But, instead of history, India has only legends. These legends of heroic times were originally deposited in sacerdotal chronicles designated under the name of Purânas, or collections of Ancient Things (the Book of Manu mentions them in several places), common source of the eighteen present-day Purânas, the composition of which is very more modern.
The Mahâbhârata has as its subject the struggle of two branches of the Lunar family, disputing the empire of India; the main subject of the Ramayana is the conquest of the island of Lanka (Ceylon) by a prince of the Solar race. But what above all makes the importance of these two vast compositions for history and geography is less the main theme than the episodes attached to it. These episodes (itihâsas), especially in the Mahâbhârata, are a real mine of geographical information, where most of the tribes of northern India pass before our eyes, with their cities, their rivers and their mountains, whose situation is generally indicated in such a way as to direct at least, if not to fix, the researches of the geographer. In both poems there are veritable itineraries, which have all the value and sometimes all the precision of those of a modern traveller. It suffices to cite here, in the Ramâyana, the march of the envoys of Ayôdhyâ towards the royal city of the prince of the Kêkayas, and that of Bharata in search of his brother Rama, retired in the forests of Tchitrakouta. It is especially these itineraries which are invaluable in restoring the map of this ancient geography; they provide so many bases and assured points, to which they can be attached step by step, and with the help of other means of comparison provided by all the documents that we have on India, the other indications less contained in the poems, such, for example, as the lists of peoples, rivers and mountains, which are given, in the VIth book of the Mahâbhârata and in the IVth book of the Râmâyana, as descriptions of the world. Historically, these lists are far from having the value of itineraries and other local indications included in the very contexture of the poems, because of the facility they offer for interpolations [the insertion of something of a different nature into something else.], and also of the errors of copyists who slip more easily than elsewhere in an arid accumulation of proper names. We can judge of this by the faults of this kind with which the analogous lists of Pliny and the Tables of Ptolemy are filled.
The Ramayana exercised the activity of translators. We currently possess the complete Italian translation by M. Gorresio, one of the eminent pupils of our illustrious and excellent Eugène Burnouf, a translation which had preceded the elegant Latin version of Wilhelm Schlegel, which stops at the second book, and the English translation by Carey and Marshman, which does not go much further, in addition to a French translation published since Mr. Gorresio's version. It would have been very much to be desired that that of Guillaume Schlegel, interrupted by the death of this eminent Indianist, had been continued, as M. Lassen had given hope; that one, at least, would not have duplicated work, the translator having followed a redaction of the poem different from that chosen by Mr. Gorresio, and the variants of the two redactions always offering useful comparisons. It is regrettable that this superabundance of effort expended on Valmiki's work did not extend to the Mahabharata. We possess a fairly large number of more or less extensive fragments, translated into English, French, German or Latin; but, up to the present, no complete translation of the poem has been attempted, although Dr. Goldstücker, of Berlin, has long held out hopes of one. This is a gap that the publication of the text, in Calcutta, cannot compensate for. A work such as this did not really enter scientific circulation until the day when, by a good translation into a European language, it was handed over to the critical study of the antiquarian and the geographer, rid of all purely philological concern. It is thus that, by his French translation of the Rig-Veda, M. Langlois has rendered an invaluable service to the historical and philosophical sciences.
The Mahâbhârata and the Râmâyana, these are the two great geographical sources of the heroic period of India; but there are still others, and very important ones. At the head of all, and even before the great poems, we must place the documents of what has been called the oupavedic literature, that is to say the writings which are attached to the Vedic literature, although from a period very posterior to the very composition of hymns. The editing of these writings, as well as the assembly of the hymns themselves in a single body of work, is certainly contemporary with the two great parallel dynasties of Tchandra and Sourya. These are the Brâhmanas, or liturgical part of the four Vedas, and the Upanishads or dogmatic and theological treatises. The Upanishads, of which Anquetii-Duperron has translated a Persian version into Latin, do not appear to be useful for historical studies; but it will not be the same with the Brahmanas, to judge by two important specimens which the extracts of Colebrooke and of Doctor Albrecht Weber have made known of them. Nevertheless, the capital piece of this first period of Brahmanic literature is the Mânava-Dharma-Çâstra, or Book of the Law, attributed to Manu, where there is a complete table of the great geographical divisions of the land of the Aryas (the Aryavarta), without which the frequent mention of the same countries in later documents would have had only an ill-defined meaning for us. The Book of Manu also contains very valuable indications for the ethnology of ancient India, notably an extensive list of impure or degraded tribes.
The hymns of the Veda placed the abode of the Arian tribes in the basin of the five great tributaries of Sindh; in the following epoch, that of the Pavavedic or heroic times, there took place a complete displacement of the habitation of the Aryas. Their territory is now in the basin of the Ganges, between the Himalayas and the Vindhyâ mountains. It is on the banks of the Sarasvati, to the west of the Upper Yamouna, that the great social reform and the definitive organization of the Brahmanic people took place; it is not far from there, on the right of the Ganges, at a short distance from its exit from the mountains, that Hastinapoura, one of the royal cities of the Lunar dynasty, was founded. A little farther to the east, in the middle of the plains of Koçala, rose the capital of the kings of the Solar race, the superb Ayôdhyâ. This fertile region, watered by the Ganges and its great tributaries, was quickly covered with numerous towns and flourishing towns. This is the terrain where we place all the documents which date from this remote period or which refer us to it, the Brahmanas, the Book of Manon, the Mahabharata and even the Ramayana; for, geographically, the part of this last poem which has for its theater the region south of the Vindhya mountains is of very secondary importance. It is the geography of the Odyssey compared to that of the Iliad. The useful side of this second part of the Ramayana is to show us what was, at the time of the greatest power of the Gangetic Aryas, the sum of their acquired notions on the southern regions up to Lanka; nothing more. As for the countries of the north-west, the first abode of the Vedic tribes, the reading of the poems and the Pavedic documents gives rise to a curious remark. These great plains cut by rivers, which extend from Sarasvatl to Sindh, still remain for a time in a close religious and political community, as well as in an intimate alliance of families or tribes, with the Gangetic Aryas; but little by little the bonds loosen; the relations weaken, and there is finally a complete separation between the Pantchanada and the Aryavarta. This split is clearly noted by an episode of great ethnological interest found in the Mabâbhârata, where the Brahmans of the south anathematize the peoples of Panchanada because of their licentious and corrupt life, and the contempt into which they have fallen. among them the prescriptions of religious law.
When one examines the fundamental conditions of the various regions of India, one easily recognizes the real causes of this separation.
The northwestern region, or Pantchanada, had been occupied for several centuries by the Vedic Aryans, but it was not their native land: they came from further beyond Sindh. The Pantchanada, which is designated in the hymns by the appellation of Sapta-Sindhu, or the Seven Rivers, had been for them only a country of conquest and passage. This country was occupied before them by a semi-barbarous aboriginal population, which had to be subjugated or driven back to the mountains; the hymns are full of the memory, or rather of the daily mention of these continual battles. We also see from numerous passages in the Rig-Veda that these relations between the Aryas and the Dasyous (this is the Vedic name of the aborigines) had gradually become less exclusively hostile in character. Many of the tribes of the country had yielded, it seems, to the double ascendancy of strength and intelligence; they had accepted the cult of the Aryas, and thus they themselves had become Aryas through adoption and religious consecration. But this religious transformation of their nationality had never been able, one can imagine, to be complete enough to efface the original diversity; and, when the pure Aryas, leaving behind them the country of the Seven Rivers, had settled definitively in the plains of the Ganges, where a new life began for them, the tribes of Panchanada, returned in full possession of their native plains, had to return soon to the customs and life of their own race. Hence, in them, this relaxation of Brahmanic law for which the bard of the Mahabharata reproaches them. The distinction of race, political life and religious creed has, moreover, been perpetuated to our day in the country of the Vedic Dasyous; the present-day Punjab differs no less today, in this triple respect, from Brahmanic Hindustan than the Panchanada of antiquity differed from Aryavarta.
This point, on which I insist, is of capital importance for the understanding of Indian antiquity; it is through lack of having perceived it or of having realized it, that the scholars who have written recently on ancient India have left very obscure many facts indicated in the legends, which otherwise would have been illuminated for them sudden clarity. This fundamental distinction between the Aryas by race and the Aryas by adoption, the former forming the pure nucleus of the Brahmanic nation, the latter only being attached to it by often vague and doubtful links, this distinction, I say, is not special to Pantchanada: it applies to the whole of India, and it is especially of great historical significance for all of ancient Aryavarta, that is to say for the region which extends from from sea to sea between the Vindhya Mountains and the Himalayas.
If the view whose historical importance I have just pointed out were derived only from a few ancient texts, which might always appear more or less questionable, its own value might also seem very doubtful; but it rests on an infinitely wider and firmer basis, on the profound study of the ethnology of India from ancient times to the present time. This study had not yet been made in its entirety, or at least no attempt had been made to relate it to ancient Sanskrit documents. The nomenclature of the tribes, so extensive in the poems and other Sanskrit documents, enters necessarily into the studies relative to ancient India; it forms there what M. Burnouf, in one of his last speeches within the Academy, very aptly called the ethnological geography of India. And here it was not enough to determine the territory that the texts assign to the ancient tribes: a far more important point was to seek out and establish their identity, that is to say to follow their history, or at least their mention, from time to time, through the documents of all the centuries, and, thus descending to modern times, to verify whether the tribe does not still exist today, in order, in this case, to supplement by the current study, taken on the spot, to what the documents of past times may have of vagueness or incompleteness. This idea is so simple and springs so naturally from the subject, that it is surprising that it has not hitherto occurred to any of the investigators of ancient India. The materials are, moreover, extremely abundant, thanks to the number of excellent contacts and local studies that we have had on India for half a century. This research therefore offered no serious difficulty other than its very scope, which was a stimulus rather than an obstacle.
I dare say that I was amply rewarded for undertaking it. An unexpected light gradually issued from this long work carried out separately on each tribe, and this light, growing ever stronger and spreading, was soon projected over the whole extent of the ancient times of India down to their last depths. I use this expression deliberately, in which there is nothing exaggerated. The hymns of the Veda are themselves enlightened by the reflections of this powerful focus; but it is above all the epic sources which have received an entirely new light. There are very few of the tribes which are mentioned there whose displacements and historical destinies I have not been able to follow down to our time; and, as all these tribes still exist, except a very few, it has been easy to ascertain to which of the two great divisions of the population of India they belong, either to the Arya race (pure or mixed), or to the aboriginal or non-Arian race. In the great poems, these tribes are all indistinctly qualified as Aryas: they were so by worship, but not by blood. This fundamental distinction cannot be overemphasized. I do not believe that I am advancing anything excessive in asserting that the most considerable aspect of the restitution of ancient times in India is in this certain and precise determination of the respective nationality of the two great classes of peoples who figure in the legendary traditions, and which are there confused under the common denomination of Aryas.
A special investigation of Indian ethnology thus became a distinct and very important branch of the studies which have for their object the reconstruction of ancient India.