Jainism

Author(s): N R Guseva
Publisher: Sindu Publications P L

Page 25

THE RISE OF REFORMATORY
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From Manu Vaivasvata two lines of Aryan kins came about, which are widely known in literature under the name of Solar and Lunar dynasties. Territorially the Solar dynasty was connected in the main with the eastern and central Gangetic regions, and the Lunar, with the north-western and the western.
It is known that marriages frequently took place between Kshatriyas and especially Kshatriyas from Solar dynasty--and the women from the local peoples.
As a result of the processes of mutual assimilation, actively taking place in the eastern regions, Aryans leaving for the east earlier than others, were in many respects alien to and further away from their fellow-brethren, who following them appeared and settled in the north-east and only through several centuries moved to the east and the south.
It is also known that towards the middle of the first millennium B.C. (and possibly also earlier) the category of so-called Vratya-Kshatriyas i.e. Kshatriyas-by-vow, which means not by birth-existed in the east.15
Many a scholar assumes that those were the Kshatriyas who were the local chiefs and heads of kinships whom the Aryan Kshatriyas were compelled to acknowledge as members of their own caste, according to diplomatic considerations of those times.16
Thus, the processes of formation of class society of Aryans and that of the Kshatriya caste went on here in many complex conditions. Economic life of the local peoples, their social relations and undoubtedly their ideologies influenced the life of Aryans in the strongest manner and in the course of long duration of time.
The process of establishing class relations in Aryan society in the northwest went on, to all appearances, in a more con
15. There are other interpretations of this term: (a) 'not fulfilling vows', 'unrighteous' Kshatriyas (Laws of Manu X 20); (b) members of non-brahmin society (Atharvaveda samhita Vol. II, pp. 769-70); V. C. Law, India as Described in Early Texts of Buddhism and Jainism, pp. 118, 125; (c) members of tribal society accepted in Vedic society through ceremony of consecration (Ch. Sen, Vratyas and the Vedic Society, pp. 288-98).
16. Jawaharlal Nehru writes that belonging to the group of Kshatriyas depended more on the position and kind- of profession than on the origin and this facilitated in the case of foreigners the process of unification with them (J. Nehru, Discovery of India).