Indian Antiquary Vol 35

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 24

18
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[JANUARY, 1906.
paths are so delightful!'. And when he had related this story the virtuous brahman went on: Listen to what he said about the rude Vähikas: Hear a diabolical song, which is always sung on the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight in the lusty city of Çakala, amid the beating of drums by night: When shall I once more sing Vähika songs in Çakala, full of meat of oxen and drunk with the strong drink of Gauḍa, in gorgeous raiment, with fair-skinned women tall of stature, eating the flesh of sheep with mouthfuls of onions, and the flesh of the boar, of fowls, of oxen and of the ass and the camel (gardabham austrikam, 2051).. fold, Calya, I will tell thee what another brahman related before the assembled Kurus: "The Vähikas eat and drink of the milk of the goat, of the she-camel and the ass (austrikam ksṣīram gardabham eva ca, 2059).
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Thus, whether it be in the reminiscences of a traveller or in homesick visions, the ass and the camel return like a refrain, whenever the land of the Vähikas is described. This country is clearly defined in the Mahabharata, VIII. 44, 6-7, 2029-30, "Far from the Himavat and the Ganga, far from the Yamuna, from the Sarasvati and the Kurukgetra, settled in the midst of the five rivers, these being six with the Indus, dwell the Vähīkas, strangers (vahya) to the law" (cf. ib. 2041, 2055, 2064). The Vähika country is the Pañjab, Çakala being the capital. In another canto of the Mahabharata the same animals reappear, when the same regions are mentioned : "When the peoples of the earth come to do homage and offer gifts to Yudhisthira, the king of Kamboja (on the North-West border of India) offers, among other presents, three hundred camels and as many she-asses (uṣṭravāmis triçatam ca) fed on pilu, çami and inguda,22 II. 50, 4, 1824. The people of the Trans-Indus (paresindhu), Vairāmas, Pāradas, Abhiras, Kitavas bring precious stones, sheep, goats, oxen, gold, asses and camels (kharoştra, 1833). Bhagadatta, the king of Pragjyotisa, accompanied by the Yavanas (Greeks), brings six thousand black-necked asses, from the bank of the Vanksu (Oxus): 1839-40; the Cinas, the Çakas, the Barbarians offer likewise ten thousand asses bred on the banks of the Oxus: 1846.
The real meaning of kharoştra crops out again, so to speak, over the vast expanse of the Mahabharata; the last echoes of this name must have reached the diaskevastes of the brahmanic period; whether isolated or combined, the two [572] terms of which it is composed could not fail to remind them of the impure heretical and barbarous region beginning at the banks of the Sutlej and stretching westward toward unknown horizons. It points, like so many other indications, to the period of the Indo-Scythians, rather towards the decline of their power, as the time when the Mahabharata was compiled. Brahmanic India, threatened by the barbaric world, gathered up the scattered treasure of her traditions and institutions and composed their epitome, in epic and in juridical code, in the Mahabharata and the Manava-dharma-çãstra; these works are inseparable from one another, animated by the same spirit, constructed partly from the same materials, both looking out on the same alien horizon: Çakas, Yavanas, Pahlavas, &c. The same movement was destined to be repeated before the Musulman conquest.
I do not pretend to decide whether Kharoştra really is, originally, the land of the ass and the camel: Kharoştra-deça, or whether it owes this appellation to the play of popular etymology upon a local name. I have already compared this name with that of the "dogheaded," Kalystrioi, described by Ctesias. M. Halévy has compared it with the Khafçtras of the Avesta, who themselves are too obscure and shadowy to afford a solution of the problem.23 If the word were a purely-Hindu creation,
22 Cf. the forests of gami and pilu in the Vähika country, sup. I adopt Protap's translation, but ustravami may mean simply "she-camel." ef. Harga-carita (ed. Nirnaya Sagar, p. 159, comm.), ustravamy ustrabharya kooid vami dvayam anye vesarim anye garvim ahub.
23 Bartholomew's Hand-Atlas of India (Constable, 1893) gives in map 24 a locality named Kharoti, two degrees south of Cabul on the upper course of the Gumal, an affluent of the Luni which falls into the Indus. I quote this name merely to show that there may have been in the same regions a similar name which could serve as a base for the Sanskritised form Kharoştra. The name Siyah posh, "black garments," given by Sadik Isfahani to the frontiers of Cabul may translate some such word as Kalavaatra, Kälostra, in which would appear a learned and late interpretation of the same original word (History of India, Elliot Dowson, II. 407).