in Bengal stretches from the landlord through a series of middle-men to the actual tiller of the soil. Every stage in industrial progress is represented; from the hunting tribes of the central plateau to the rigid trade-guilds of Guzerat. The Hindu legislators recognised that each of these diverse stages Its incor- of social development had its own usages and unwritten law. poration of Vrihaspati says, 'The laws (dharma) practised by the various

local

customs.

Perils of modern codification.

countries, castes, and tribes, they are to be preserved; otherwise the people are agitated.' Devala says, 'What gods there are in any country, . . . and whatsoever be the custom and law anywhere, they are not to be despised there; the law there is such.' Varáhamihira says, 'The custom of the country is first to be considered; what is the rule in each country, that is to be done.' The most learned English judge in Southern India thus sums up: 'By custom only can the Dharma-sástra [Hindu law] be the rule of others than Bráhmans [only onethirtieth of the population of Madras], and even in the case of Brahmans it is very often superseded by custom.'1

The English, on assuming the government of India, wisely declared that they would administer justice according to the customs of the people. But our High Courts enforce the Brahmanical codes with a comprehensiveness and precision unknown in ancient India. Thus in Bengal, the custom of sagai, by which deserted or divorced wives among the lower castes marry again, was lately tried according to the spirit of Hindu law;' while in Madras, judges have pointed out a serious divergence between the Hindu law as now administered, and the actual usages of the people. Those usages are unwritten and uncertain. The Hindu law is printed in many accessible forms; and Hindu barristers are ever pressing its principles upon our courts. Efforts at comprehensive codification in British India are thus surrounded by special difficulties. For it would be improper to give the fixity of a code to all the unwritten half-fluid usages current among the 300 unhomogeneous castes of Hindus; while it might be fraught with future injustice to exclude any of them. Each age has the gift of adjusting its institutions to its actual wants, especially among tribes whose customs have not been reduced to written law. Many of those customs will, if left to themselves, die out; others of them, which prove suited to the new

1 Dr. Burnell's Dáya-vibhágha, Introd. p. xv. See also Hindu Law as Administered by the High Court of Judicature at Madras, by J. Nelson, M.A., District Judge of Cuddapa, chaps. iii. and iv. (Madras, 1877). Especially Journal Roy. As. Soc., pp. 208-236 (April 1881).

social developments under British rule, will live. A code should stereotype the survival of the fittest; but the process of natural selection must be, to some extent, the work of time, and not an act of conscious legislation. This has been recognised by the ablest of Anglo-Indian codifiers. They restrict the word code to the systematic arrangement of the rules relating to some well-marked section of juristic rights, or to some executive department of the administration of justice. 'In its larger sense,' write the Indian Law Commissioners in 1879, of a general assemblage of all the laws of a community, no attempt has yet been made in this country to satisfy the conception of a code. The time for its realization has manifestly not arrived.' The number of works on Law, published in the native languages in India in 1877, was 165.

literature

The Brahmans were not merely the depositaries of the Secular sacred books, the philosophy, the science, and the laws of of the the ancient Hindu commonwealth; they were also the creators Hindus. and custodians of its secular literature. They had a practical monopoly of Vedic learning, and their policy was to trace back every branch of knowledge and of intellectual effort to the Veda. In this policy they were aided by the divergence which, as we have seen, arose at a very early date between the written and spoken languages of India. Sanskrit literature, apart from Its chief religion, philosophy, and law, consists mainly of two great epics, the drama, and a vast body of legendary, erotic, and mystical poetry.

branches.

bharata ;

The venerable epic of the Mahábhárata ranks first. The The Maháorthodox legend ascribes it to the sage Vyása, who, according to Brahman chronology, compiled the inspired hymns into the four Vedas, nearly five thousand years ago (3001 B.C.). But one beauty of Sanskrit is that every word discloses its ancient origin in spite of medieval fictions, and Vyása means simply the arranger,' from the verb 'to fit together.' No fewer than twenty-eight Vyásas, incarnations of Brahma and Vishnu, came down in successive astronomical eras to arrange and promulgate the Vedas on earth. Many of the legends in the Mahábhárata are of Vedic antiquity, and the main story deals with a period assigned, in the absence of any conclusive evidence, to about 1200 B.C.; and certainly long anterior to the time of Buddha, 543 B.C. But its compilation into its present literary form seems to have taken place several centuries later. Pánini makes no clear allusion to it (350 B.C.). The inquisitive Greek ambassador and Its date; historian, Megasthenes, does not appear to have heard of it

Its growth.

Central

story of

bhárata.

during his stay in India, 300 B.C. Dion Chrysostomos supplies the earliest external evidence of the existence of the Mahábhárata, circ. 75 A.D. The arrangement of its vast mass of legends must probably have covered a long period. Indeed, the present poem bears traces of three separate eras of compilation; during which its collection of primitive folk-tales grew (as stated by itself) from 8800 slokas or couplets, into a cyclopædia of Indian mythology and legendary lore extending over eighteen books and 220,000 lines. The twenty-four books of Homer's Iliad comprise only 15,693 lines; and the twelve books of Virgil's Eneid, only 9868.

The central story of the Mahábhárata occupies scarcely the Maha- one-fourth of the whole, or about 50,000 lines. It narrates a prehistoric struggle between two families of the Lunar race for a patch of country near Delhi. These families, alike descended from the royal Bharata, consisted of two brotherhoods, cousins to each other, and both brought up under the same roof. The five Pándavas were the miraculously born sons of King Pándu, who, smitten by a curse, resigned the sovereignty to his brother Dhrita-ráshtra, and retired to a hermitage in the Himalayas, where he died. The ruins of his capital, Hastinapura, or the 'Elephant City,' are pointed out beside a deserted bed of the Ganges, 57 miles north-east of Delhi, at this day. His brother ruled in his stead, and to him one hundred sons were born, who took the name of the Kauravas from an ancestor, Kuru. Dhrita-ráshtra acted as a faithful guardian to his five nephews, the Pandavas, and chose the eldest of them as heir to the family kingdom. His own sons resented this act of supercession; and so arose the quarrel between the hundred Kauravas and the five Pándavas which forms the main story of the Mahabharata.

Its outline.

The hundred Kauravas forced their father to send away their cousins into the forest, and there they treacherously burned down the hut in which the five Pándavas dwelt. The latter escaped, and wandered in the disguise of Brahmans to the court of King Draupada, who had proclaimed a swayamvara, or maiden's-choice, at which his daughter would take the victor as her husband. Arjuna, one of the Pándavas, bent the mighty bow which had defied the strength of all the rival chiefs, and so obtained the fair princess, Draupadí, who became the common wife of the five brethren. Their uncle, the good Dhrita-ráshtra, recalled them to his capital, and gave them onehalf of the family territory, reserving the other half for his own The Pándava brethren hived off to a new settlement,

sons.

Indra-prastha, afterwards Delhi; clearing the jungle, and driving out the Nágas or forest - races. For a time peace reigned; but the Kauravas tempted Yudishthira, 'firm in fight,' the eldest of the Pándavas, to a gambling match, at which he lost his kingdom, his brothers, himself, and last of all, his wife. Their father, however, forced his sons to restore their wicked gains to their cousins. But Yudishthira was again seduced by the Kauravas to stake his kingdom at dice, again lost it, and had to retire with his wife and brethren into exile for twelve years. Their banishment ended, the five Pandavas returned at the head of an army to win back their kingdom. Many battles followed, gods and divine heroes Final joining in the struggle, until at last all the hundred Kauravas were slain, and of the friends and kindred of the Pándavas Kauravas. only the five brethren remained.

overthrow

of the 100

the five

Their uncle, Dhrita-ráshtra, made over to them the whole kingdom; and for a long time the Pándavas ruled gloriously, Reign of celebrating the aswa-medha, or 'great horse sacrifice,' in Pandavas. token of their holding imperial sway. But their uncle, old and blind, ever taunted them with the slaughter of his hundred sons, until at last he crept away with his few surviving ministers, his aged wife, and his sister-in-law, the mother of the Pándavas, to a hermitage, where the worn-out band perished in a forest fire. The five brethren, smitten by remorse, gave up their kingdom; and taking their wife, Draupadí, and a faithful dog, they departed to the Himalayas to seek the heaven of Their pilIndra on Mount Meru. One by one the sorrowful pilgrims died grimage to heaven. upon the road, until only the eldest brother, Yudishthira, and the dog reached the gate of heaven. Indra invited him to enter, but he refused if his lost wife and brethren were not also admitted. The prayer was granted, but he still declined unless his faithful dog might come in with him. This could not be allowed, and Yudishthira, after a glimpse of heaven, was thrust down to hell, where he found many of his old comrades in anguish. He resolved to share their sufferings rather than to enjoy paradise alone. But having triumphed in this crowning trial, the whole scene was revealed to be máyá or illusion, and the reunited band entered into heaven, where they rest for ever with Indra.

the central

nar- story.

Even this story, which forms merely the nucleus of the Slow Mahábhárata, is evidently the growth of far distant ages. For growth of example, the two last books, the 17th and 18th, which rate the Great Journey' and 'the Ascent to Heaven,' are the product of a very different epoch of thought from the early

ones, which portray the actual life of courts and camps in ancient India. The swayam-vara or husband-choosing of Draupadi is a genuine relic of the warrior-age of the Aryans in Hindustán. Her position as the common wife of the five brethren preserves a trace of even more primitive institutions The poly-institutions still represented by the polyandry of the Nairs andry of and other hill races, and by domestic customs which are Draupadi. survivals of polyandry among the Hinduized low-castes all over India. Thus, in the Punjab, among Ját families too poor to bear the marriage expenses of all the males, the wife of the eldest son has sometimes to accept her brothers-in-law as joint husbands. The polyandry of the Ghakkars, the brave people of Ráwal Pindi District, was one of their characteristics which specially struck the advancing Muhammadans in 1008 A.D.1 The Kárakat Vellálars of Madura, at the opposite extremity of the peninsula, no longer practise polyandry; but they preserve a trace of it in their condonement of cohabitation with the husband's kindred, while adultery outside the husband's family entails expulsion from caste. Such customs became abhorrent at an early period to the Bráhmans; and they have justified Draupadi's position, on the ground that as the five Pandava brethren were divinely begotten emanations from one deity, they formed in reality only one person, and could be lawfully married to the same woman. No such afterthought was required to uphold the honour of Draupadí in the age when the legend took its rise. Throughout the whole Mahábhárata she figures as the type of a high-born princess, and a chaste, brave, and faithful wife. She shares in every sorrow and triumph of the five brethren; bears a son to each; and finally enters with the true-hearted band into the glory of Indra. Her husbands take a terrible vengeance on any insult offered to her, and seem quite unaware that a later age would deem her position one which required explanation.2

The rest of the Mahábhárata.

The struggle for the kingdom of Hastinapur forms, however, only a fourth of the Mahábhárata. The remainder consists of later additions; some of them are legends of the early Aryan settlements in the Middle Land, tacked on to the central story; others are mythological episodes, theological 1 See post, p. 173.

2 The beautiful story of Sávitrí, the wife faithful to the end, is told in the Mahabharata by the sage Márkandeya in answer to Yudishthira's question, whether any woman so true and noble as Draupadi had ever been known. Sávitrí dogged the steps of Yama, King of Death, until she wrung from him, one by one, many blessings for her family, and finally the restoration of her husband to life.