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40
JAINISM
are actually emigrants from India and preserve to this day the most ancient forms of religious faiths which in India became the component parts of Jainism.
Probably quite a large range of Indo-Himalayan peoples was, in antiquity, the bearer of close religious ideas. It is certain that in the middle of the 1st millennium B.C., caravan routes existed from Bihar to Nepal and Tibet, along which trade was carried on and the elements of the faiths of various peoples spread out along with it. The Greek, Ktesy, the late witness of the war of Artakserks II with Kir the Junior in 401 B.C. describing the inhabitants of the lower Himalayas from Bhutan to Indus, said that they maintain contacts with the population of the plains.
The English scholar F. Wilford observes that the rajas of near-Himalayan regions were probably of Nepalese origin.“ From all this data, the picture of long and constant contacts between the populations of ancient Bihar and the Himalayas can be drawn.
From the near-Himalayan regions also comes the tribe of Chero, which was at some time strong in North-Western Bihar -the representatives of which ruled there in the course of seven generations. This tribe is sometime relegated to proto Australoids. It is possible that Ktesy wrote precisely about them.
The ancient history of Chero is not completely studied but it is in no way possible to exclude the probability of their resistance to the settlement of the Aryans and to the forcible introduction of Aryan culture. This means that probably their cultural and ethical concepts also formed a part of the reformatory anti-Aryan ideology
The Lichhavi tribe played a significant role in the history of Jainism, about which 'Manusmriti'42 says that Lichhavi is born out of 'Vratya-Kshatriyas'. The linguistic and racial affiliation of this tribe is not determined by ethnography. In the ancient Indian literature, it is referred to as an independent and proud tribe.
Lichhavi, along with the not less known tribes of the first 41. F. Wilford, Anu-Gangam or the Gangetic Provinces and More Particularly of Magadha, p. 71.
42. 'Laws of Manu', X, 22.
