Situation before the Rebellion
This article is an extract from ETHNOGRAPHY OF ANCIENT INDIA BY ROBERT SHAFER With 2 maps 1954 OTTO HARRAS SOWITZ . WIESBADEN Indpaedia is an archive. It neither agrees nor disagrees |
We may here briefly review conditions in India before the Great Rebellion. Map 1 will show that the Anavas had all but submerged the Indo-Aryans in the Panjab, but they had themselves become partly aryanized.
We find traces of the Yadavas on the fringe of a vast area in the west : the Vatadhana and the Salva and the subdivisions of the latter along the Satadru; then the Kukura, Andhaka, Surasena, Abhisaha, Pataccara, and Usinara between the Drsadvati and the Ganges; below there Mathura, and the former Yadava kingdom of Cedi along the south bank of the Yamuna; and to the east Jathara, Kaukura, Bhoja, and Dasarna ; then coming west along the Purna were Nisadha, and Vidarbha ; and along the west coast, Dandaka, Surastra, Nairrta; and along the lower Indus, Anarta and Anupa. Within this peripheral area were the Haihayas, the younger branch of the Yadavas, along the Vindhyas. There is little doubt that the Yadavas and Haihayas had once been the chief power west and south of the Yamuna. *
But shortly before the Great Rebellion the Yadavas had conducted a long struggle with the chief power in the east, Jarasandha, king of the Magadhas, who had finally forced Krsna to flee from Mathura to the west. And two of the principal kingdoms, Matsya and Cedi, had become aryanized.
The Yadavas were probably already very weak before the Great Rebellion, partly from the losses sustained in the long war with Jara- sandha, partly from aryanization of some of the most important king- doms, partly from the scattered position of the remaining Yadavas and their lack of cohesion. To say that one was a Yadava still commanded respect in an Aryan, because the Yadavas had been the chief force in the west, and force always commanded respect in an Aryan. But the Mahabharata seems to know little about the Yadavas. It is not clear whether the Bhojas were Yadavas or Haihayas or both, whether Yuyu- dhana Satyaki and Cekitana were Satvatas or Vrsnis, or just what Yadava tribes fled to Anarta. 1 This confusion is perhaps in part because the
1 The Aitareya Brahmana seems to use Satvata for Yadava, or at least for the Yadavas south of the Satpura range (viii. 14). And at a later period Andhakas,
Mahabharata is not the book of the Yadavas, l but in part because of indifference about people who were no longer very important. 2
In the east the chief powers were the eastern Anava, to whom the Saudyumna stock offered some support, and the eastern Manava.
The Aryan strength was along the Yamuna and the upper Ganges. The Pandavas received very little aid from the Indo-Aryans of the northwest. The Indo-Aryans supporting the Pandavas were so far in the minority that they would have lost the war, according to their own account in the Mahabharata, if it had not been for their superior weapons which the rsis, of course, attributed to their gods 3 .
For the line-up of opposing forces, see Map 2. 4
The southern Dravidians are said to have been on the Pandava side. Perhaps the Dravidians had been annoyed by encroachments of the Yadavas further north and so favored the Pandavas. But of course there is enormous exaggeration in the Great Epic, 5 and probably
Vrnis, Dvaivavrdhas, and Mahabhojas were thought to be four branches of Satavatas (Law).
1 The confusion is perhaps worse in the Harivarhs'a, but that is later than the Mahabharata.
2 They continued to play an important role south of the Vindhyas.
3 For a discussion of the "divine" weapons of the Aryans, see E. W. Hopkins, "The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India ..." JAOS
13 (1887), 296ff., and "On Fire-Arms in Ancient India," ibid., p. cxciv ff., and especially V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, War in Ancient India (Univ. Madras, 1944), pp. 93 ff.
In a study of one of the weapons in the Pandava army, M. B. Emeneau in- ferred that the Sarriga, the bow of Kr^na, was probably a sinew-backed wooden bow with a strip of horn on its belly, giving much greater force. This bow seems to have originated in Siberia or Central Asia, and there is no evidence of it in the Rgvoda. (From an address before the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Nov. 24, 1951, with Prof. Emeneau's permission).
4 For the Kaurava supporters the writer has also used the list in Cr. Ed. VIII. 4, Roy VIII. 5, which is quite orderless and hence has not been included in the appendix. A few names have also been added from Pargiter's article on "The Nations of India at the Battle between the Pandavas and Kauravas," JRAS (1908), 309 336. Participants in the war, whose geographical location were too uncertain to place on Map 2 were: Kaurava -AsVataka, Arecaka (?), Kanana (?), Govasa, Cambupa ( ? ), Cicchila ( ? ), Dasamiya, Paribhadraka, Prasthala, Mavellaka, Lalittha, Varmila (?), Vikarna, Venika, Sreni, Sarhsthana; Pandava Kum- bharsa(?), Tittira, Nakula, Narayana, Prabhadraka (see Paribh- in Kuru army), Madaka, Salveya, Somaka; on both sides Da6eraka, Pi&aca, Raksasa, Naga.
5 See p. 1, n. 2. An example closer to the subject under discussion is afforded by a comparison of the digvijayas (list 2 below) with the dyuta list (no. 3 below). The digvijayas show the Pandavas conquering all India. But the tribute list indi- cates that the digvijayas were probably actually only punitive expeditions against foreign peoples in the Panjab, the Himalayas, and the east. Some scattered refe- rences to better-known kingdoms follow the list published hero; these perhaps represent contributions to help carry out the expedition; and were put down by later poets as tribute. The tribute list suggests that the Pandavas began their career as military adventurers and semi -mercenaries.
some of this was in the earlier Kuru epic. It is difficult to see how some of the widely scattered Kaurava forces could have rendered effective aid. Since this is primarily a work on ethnography, the array of countries in the Great Rebellion has been of primary interest to show the position of the Aryans, not to make a critical analysis of the allied powers.
