India: What can it teach us? Part 15

3. "The sound rises up to heaven above the earth; she stirs up with splendor her endless power.[198] As from a cloud, the showers thunder forth, when the Sindhu comes, roaring like a bull.

4. "To thee, O Sindhu, they (the other rivers) come as lowing mother-cows (run) to their young with their milk.[199] Like a king in battle thou leadest the two wings, when thou reachest the front of these down-rushing rivers.

5. "Accept, O Ganga (Ganges), Yamuna (Jumna), Sarasvati (Sursuti), _S_utudri (Sutlej), Parush_n_i (Iravati, Ravi), my praise![200] With the Asikni (Akesines) listen, O Marudv_ri_dha,[201] and with the Vitasta (Hydaspes, Behat); O ar_g_ikiya,[202] listen with the Sushoma.[203]

6. "First thou goest united with the T_ri_sh_t_ama on thy journey, with the Susartu, the Rasa (Ra_m_ha, Araxes?[204]), and the _S_veti--O Sindhu, with the Kubha (Kophen, Cabul river) to the Gomati (Gomal), with the Mehatnu to the Krumu (Kurum)--with whom thou proceedest together.

7. "Sparkling, bright, with mighty splendor she carries the waters across the plains--the unconquered Sindhu, the quickest of the quick, like a beautiful mare--a sight to see.

8. "Rich in horses, in chariots, in garments, in gold, in booty,[205] in wool,[206] and in straw,[207] the Sindhu, handsome and young, clothes herself in sweet flowers.[208]

9. "The Sindhu has yoked her easy chariot with horses; may she conquer prizes for us in the race. The greatness of her chariot is praised as truly great--that chariot which is irresistible, which has its own glory, and abundant strength."[209]

This hymn does not sound perhaps very poetical, in our sense of the word; yet if you will try to realize the thoughts of the poet who composed it, you will perceive that it is not without some bold and powerful conceptions.

Take the modern peasants, living in their villages by the side of the Thames, and you must admit that he would be a remarkable man who could bring himself to look on the Thames as a kind of a general, riding at the head of many English rivers, and leading them on to a race or a battle. Yet it is easier to travel in England, and to gain a commanding view of the river-system of the country, than it was three thousand years ago to travel over India, even over that part of India which the poet of our hymn commands. He takes in at one swoop three great river-systems, or, as he calls them, three great armies of rivers--those flowing from the north-west into the Indus, those joining it from the north-east, and, in the distance, the Ganges and the Jumnah with their tributaries. Look on the map and you will see how well these three armies are determined; but our poet had no map--he had nothing but high mountains and sharp eyes to carry out his trigonometrical survey. Now I call a man, who for the first time could _see_ those three marching armies of rivers, a poet.

The next thing that strikes one in that hymn--if hymn we must call it--is the fact that all these rivers, large and small, have their own proper names. That shows a considerable advance in civilized life, and it proves no small degree of coherence, or what the French call _solidarity_, between the tribes who had taken possession of Northern India. Most settlers call the river on whose banks they settle "_the river_." Of course there are many names for river. It may be called the runner,[210] the fertilizer, the roarer--or, with a little poetical metaphor, the arrow, the horse, the cow, the father, the mother, the watchman, the child of the mountains. Many rivers had many names in different parts of their course, and it was only when communication between different settlements became more frequent, and a fixed terminology was felt to be a matter of necessity, that the rivers of a country were properly baptized and registered. All this had been gone through in India before our hymn became possible.

And now we have to consider another, to my mind most startling fact.

We here have a number of names of the rivers of India, as they were known to one single poet, say about 1000 B.C. We then hear nothing of India till we come to the days of Alexander, and when we look at the names of the Indian rivers, represented as well as they could be by Alexander's companions, mere strangers in India, and by means of a strange language and a strange alphabet, we recognize, without much difficulty, nearly all of the old Vedic names.

In this respect the names of rivers have a great advantage over the names of towns in India. What we now call _Dilli_ or _Delhi_[211] was in ancient times called Indraprastha, in later times _Shahjahanabad_.

_Oude_ is Ayodhya, but the old name of Saketa is forgotten. The town of Pa_t_aliputra, known to the Greeks as _Palimbothra_, is now called _Patna_.[212]

Now I can a.s.sure you this persistency of the Vedic river-names was to my mind something so startling that I often said to myself, This cannot be--there must be something wrong here. I do not wonder so much at the names of the _Indus_ and the _Ganges_ being the same. The Indus was known to early traders, whether by sea or by land. Skylax sailed from the country of the Paktys, _i.e._ the Pushtus, as the Afghans still call themselves, down to the mouth of the Indus. That was under Darius Hystaspes (521-486). Even before that time India and the Indians were known by their name, which was derived from _Sindhu_, the name of their frontier river. The neighboring tribes who spoke Iranic languages all p.r.o.nounced, like the Persian, the _s_ as an _h_.[213]

Thus Sindhu became Hindhu (Hidhu), and, as h's were dropped even at that early time, Hindhu became Indu. Thus the river was called _Indos_, the people _Indoi_ by the Greeks, who first heard of India from the Persians.

_Sindhu_ probably meant originally the divider, keeper, and defender, from sidh, to keep off. It was a masculine, before it became a feminine. No more telling name could have been given to a broad river, which guarded peaceful settlers both against the inroads of hostile tribes and the attacks of wild animals. A common name for the ancient settlements of the Aryans in India was "the Seven Rivers," "Sapta Sindhava_h_." But though sindhu was used as an appellative noun for river in general (cf. Rig-Veda VI. 19, 5, samudre na sindhava_h_ yadamana_h_, "like rivers longing for the sea"), it remained throughout the whole history of India the name of its powerful guardian river, the Indus.

In some pa.s.sages of the Rig-Veda it has been pointed out that sindhu might better be translated by "sea," a change of meaning, if so it can be called, fully explained by the geographical conditions of the country. There are places where people could swim across the Indus, there are others where no eye could tell whether the boundless expanse of water should be called river or sea. The two run into each other, as every sailor knows, and naturally the meaning of sindhu, river, runs into the meaning of sindhu, sea.

But besides the two great rivers, the Indus and the Ganges--in Sanskrit the Ganga, literally the Go-go--we have the smaller rivers, and many of their names also agree with the names preserved to us by the companions of Alexander.[214]

The Yamuna, the Jumna, was known to Ptolemy as ??????a,[215] to Pliny as Jomanes, to Arrian, somewhat corrupted, as Jobares.[216]

The _S_utudri, or, as it was afterward called, _S_atadru, meaning "running in a hundred streams," was known to Ptolemy as ?ad??d?? or ???ad??; Pliny called it Sydrus; and Megasthenes, too, was probably acquainted with it as ?ad??d??. In the Veda[217] it formed with the Vipa_s_ the frontier of the Punjab, and we hear of fierce battles fought at that time, it may be on the same spot where in 1846 the battle of the Sutledge was fought by Sir Hugh Gough and Sir Henry Hardinge. It was probably on the Vipa_s_ (later Vipa_s_a), a north-western tributary of the Sutledge, that Alexander's army turned back. The river was then called Hyphasis; Pliny calls it Hypasis,[218]

a very fair approximation to the Vedic Vipa_s_, which means "unfettered." Its modern name is Bias or Bejah.

The next river on the west is the Vedic Parush_n_i, better known as Iravati,[219] which Strabo calls Hyarotis, while Arrian gives it a more Greek appearance by calling it Hydraotes. It is the modern Rawi.

It was this river which the Ten Kings when attacking the T_ri_tsus under Sudas tried to cross from the west by cutting off its water. But their stratagem failed, and they perished in the river (Rig-Veda VII.

18, 8-9).

We then come to the Asikni, which means "black." That river had another name also, _K_andrabhaga, which means "streak of the moon."

The Greeks, however, p.r.o.nounced that Sa?da??f????, and this had the unlucky meaning of "the devourer of Alexander." Hesychius tells us that in order to avert the bad omen Alexander changed the name of that river into ??es????, which would mean "the Healer;" but he does not tell, what the Veda tells us, that this name ??es???? was a Greek adaptation of another name of the same river, namely Asikni, which had evidently supplied to Alexander the idea of calling the Asikni ??es????. It is the modern Chinab.

Next to the Akesines we have the Vedic Vitasta, the last of the rivers of the Punjab, changed in Greek into Hydaspes. It was to this river that Alexander retired, before sending his fleet down the Indus and leading his army back to Babylon. It is the modern Behat or Jilam.

I could identify still more of these Vedic rivers, such as, for instance, the Kubha, the Greek Cophen, the modern Kabul river;[220]

but the names which I have traced from the Veda to Alexander, and in many cases from Alexander again to our own time, seem to me sufficient to impress upon us the real and historical character of the Veda.

Suppose the Veda were a forgery--suppose at least that it had been put together after the time of Alexander--how could we explain these names? They are names that have mostly a meaning in Sanskrit, they are names corresponding very closely to their Greek corruptions, as p.r.o.nounced and written down by people who did not know Sanskrit. How is a forgery possible here?

I selected this hymn for two reasons. First, because it shows us the widest geographical horizon of the Vedic poets, confined by the snowy mountains in the north, the Indus and the range of the Suleiman mountains in the west, the Indus or the seas in the south, and the valley of the Jumna and Ganges in the east. Beyond that, the world, though open, was unknown to the Vedic poets. Secondly, because the same hymn gives us also a kind of historical background to the Vedic age. These rivers, as we may see them to-day, as they were seen by Alexander and his Macedonians, were seen also by the Vedic poets. Here we have an historical continuity--almost living witnesses, to tell us that the people whose songs have been so strangely, ay, you may almost say, so miraculously preserved to us, were real people, lairds with their clans, priests, or rather, servants of their G.o.ds, shepherds with their flocks, dotted about on the hills and valleys, with inclosures or palisades here and there, with a few strongholds, too, in case of need--living their short life on earth, as at that time life might be lived by men, without much pushing and crowding and trampling on each other--spring, summer, and winter leading them on from year to year, and the sun in his rising and setting lifting up their thoughts from their meadows and groves which they loved, to a world in the East, from which they had come, or to a world in the West, to which they were gladly hastening on. They had what I call religion, though it was very simple, and hardly reduced as yet to the form of a creed. "There is a Beyond," that was all they felt and knew, though they tried, as well as they could, to give names to that Beyond, and thus to change religion into _a_ religion. They had not as yet a name for G.o.d--certainly not in our sense of the word--or even a general name for the G.o.ds; but they invented name after name to enable them to grasp and comprehend by some outward and visible tokens powers whose presence they felt in nature, though their true and full essence was to them, as it is to us, invisible and incomprehensible.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 150: Wilson, Lectures, p. 9.]

[Footnote 151: As it has been doubted, and even denied, that the publication of the Rig-Veda and its native commentary has had some important bearing on the resuscitation of the religious life of India, I feel bound to give at least one from the many testimonials which I have received from India. It comes from the adi Brahma Samaj, founded by Ram Mohun Roy, and now represented by its three branches, the adi Brahma Samaj, the Brahma Samaj of India, and the Sadharano Brahma Samaj. "The Committee of the adi Brahma Samaj beg to offer you their hearty congratulations on the completion of the gigantic task which has occupied you for the last quarter of a century. By publishing the Rig-Veda at a time when Vedic learning has by some sad fatality become almost extinct in the land of its birth, you have conferred a boon upon us Hindus, for which we cannot but be eternally grateful."]

[Footnote 152: Rig-Veda X. 114, 5.]

[Footnote 153: Rig-Veda X. 121.]

[Footnote 154: Muir, iv. 9.]

[Footnote 155: Rig-Veda I. 139, 11.]

[Footnote 156: Rig-Veda III. 6, 9.]

[Footnote 157: The following names of Devapatnis or wives of the G.o.ds are given in the Vaitana Sutra XV. 3 (ed. Garbe): P_ri_thivi, the wife of Agni, Va_k_ of Vata, Sena of Indra, Dhena of B_ri_haspati, Pathya of Pushan, Gayatri of Vasu, Trish_t_ubh of Rudra, _G_agati of aditya, a.n.u.sh_t_ubh of Mitra, Vira_g_ of Varu_n_a, Pankti of Vish_n_u, Diksha of Soma.]

[Footnote 158: Rig-Veda III. 9, 9.]

[Footnote 159: Grimm showed that Thorr is sometimes the supreme G.o.d, while at other times he is the son of odinn. This, as Professor Zimmer truly remarks, need not be regarded as the result of a revolution, or even of gradual decay, as in the case of Dyaus and Tyr, but simply as inherent in the character of a nascent polytheism. See Zeitschrift fur D. A., vol. xii. p. 174.]

[Footnote 160: "Among not yet civilized races prayers are addressed to a G.o.d with a special object, and to that G.o.d who is supposed to be most powerful in a special domain. He becomes for the moment the highest G.o.d to whom all others must give place. He may be invoked as the highest and the only G.o.d, without any slight being intended for the other G.o.ds."--Zimmer, l. c. p. 175.]

[Footnote 161: "Es handelt sich hier nicht um amerikanische oder afrikanische Zersplitterung, sondern eine uberraschende Gleichartigkeit dehnt sich durch die Weite und Breite des Stillen Oceans, und wenn wir Oceanien in der vollen Auffa.s.sung nehmen mit Einschluss Mikro-und Mela-nesiens (bis Malaya), selbst weiter. Es la.s.st sich sagen, da.s.s ein einheitlicher Gedankenbau, in etwa 120 Langen und 70 Breitegraden, ein Viertel unsers Erdglobus uberwolbt."--Bastian, Die Heilige Sage der Polynesier, p. 57.]

[Footnote 162: Henry S. King & Co., London, 1876.]

[Footnote 163: P. 58.]

[Footnote 164: There is a second version of the story even in the small island of Mangaia; see "Myths and Songs," p. 71.]

[Footnote 165: See before, p. 158.]

[Footnote 166: This explanation is considered altogether inadequate by many scholars. It is, of course, not altogether a question of learning, but also one of judgment.--AM. PUBS.]

[Footnote 167: "The Sacred Books of the East," vol. i. p. 249: "The first half is the earth, the second half the heaven, their uniting the rain, the uniter Par_g_anya." And so it is when it (Par_g_anya) rains thus strongly--without ceasing, day and night together--then they say also, "Heaven and earth have come together."--From the Aitareya-ara_n_yaka, III.

2, 2.--A. W.]

[Footnote 168: Bastian, Heilige Sage der Polynesier, p. 36.]

[Footnote 169: Bergaigne, "La Religion Vedique," p. 240.]

[Footnote 170: Ait. Br. IV. 27; Muir, iv. p. 23.]