Indian Antiquary Vol 40

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 43

JANUARY, 1911.)
FOREIGN ELEMENTS IN THE HINDU POPULATION.
37
explains, he says, why Karņa also, who was brought up by Adbiratha, a descendant of Vijaya, was called 'son of Sûta.' I do not know where the commentator obtained his information from, regarding the origin of Vijaya's mother. The fact was probably something like this: In the Harivansa (1.1776) we are told that Bțihanmanas, father of Vijaya, had two wives named Yabodevi and Satya, both daughters of Vainateya. And from Satyasprang Vijaya. Vainateya, being a son of Kaspapa, was a Brâhmaņa; the queens of Bțihanmanas were consequently Brahmaņa girls. Vijaya had thus for his father a Kshatriya and for his mother a Brahmani, and was thus a Brahma-Kshatra. There can be little doubt that & something derogatory is here implied, as clearly shown by the term súta which is applied to Adhiratha in 1,1709. Thus we see that, oven in the old Puranas, the meaning of the phrase Brahma-Kshatra was not definitely settled, and that at one place it is applied to a Kshatriya dynasty from which Brâhmaņa families sprung up and at another to princes, one of whose forefathers, although a Kshatriya, married a Brâhmaņa woman. There can, however, be no doubt, I think as to the sense in which the expression is used in inscriptions. It is applied, as I have stated above, to families that were Brahmana first but became Kshatriya afterwards.
[This was how I had concluded my lecture that has been transformed into this paper :-" To sum up what we have said so far, there is hardly & class or casta in India, which has not & foreign strain in it. There is an admixture of alien blood not only amongst the warrior classesthe Rajputs and the Marâţâs, but also amongst the Brahmaņas, who are under the happy delusion that they are perfectly free from all foreign element. If the Brahmaņas have not escaped this taint, As we have seen, and yet call themselves Brahmaņas, it excites the risibility of the antiquarian or the ethnologist when he finds some Brûhmaņa castes strenuously calling in question the claims of certain warrior classes to style themselves Kshatriyas. The grounds of this strenuous opposition, as stated by the Brahmaņa castes, are that pure unmixed Vedic Aryan blood does not run through the veins of those warrior classes. Yes, this is quite true; but it is equally true that pure Vedic Aryan blood does not run through the veins of the Brahmaņas also. Looked at from the antiquarian or ethnological point of view, the claims of either community to such a purity are untenable and absurd. As the chief thing valued by the members of the higher castes, viz., purity of blood, i.e., absence of any admixture of aboriginal or foreign blood, bas been proved to be hollow and nonexistent, the caste jealousies and controversies, which cause immense miscbief, are really useless and meaningless. It is to be sincerely hoped that the knowledge furnished by ethnology and the study of ancient inscriptions will spread among the people, and open their eyes to the emptiness and worthlessness of the thing they are fighting for, and put an end to all caste animosities and disputes, which are the bane of India.]
CORRESPONDENCE. IS TOBACCO INDIGENOUS TO INDIA P century B.C. to the twelfth century A.D. In SIE,
support of my contention that the practice of In a letter published in the Indian Antiquary,
smoking tobacco was well-known in India long June, 1909, p. 176, headed "Is tobacco indigenous
before the sixteenth century, I now proceed to to India ?” I pointed out, in view of the asser- adduce some evidence from Sanskrit literation made by Mr. V. A. Smith that tobacco and
ture. the hukka were unknown in India before the sixteenth century, when the drug was introduced In the Kadambari (P. 85, line 4, Kašināth by the Portnguese, that an earthen hukka was Pandurang Parab's 2nd Revised Ed., Nirnayaobtained from the ruins of the Sārnath monas- sagar Press, Bombay, 1896) the poet Bāņa, who teries, the dates of which range from the third ! lived in the seventh century at the court of king
II may state at the outset that I am non-smoker and have no particular interest in proving that my doantrymen have been smoking tobacco from the earliest times.