DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

94 SUDAS AND THE TEN-KING BATTLE [4.3
Sambara held many pur strongholds,, being enemy of Divodasa — who
brings us to the historical stratum of the RV. That is, we now read of
struggles between human protagonists, not of gods against demons.
Divodasa had no city, nor did any of his descendants, as far as vedic
information goes.
Indra is ‘the breaker of cities’ (puramdara), but neither Indr.a
nor any follower of his described as builder or possessor of a city. None
of them ever construct anything of masonry. The word for brick ista
does not occur in this veda, only in later ones, where the bricks were
first used merely for building sacrificial altars. The standard Aryan
settlement is a grama which continued to mean village, while it could
even denote an overnight encampment. The Rgvedic people destroyed
Indus cities without a reoccupation sufficient to make an impression upon
their sacred book. They failed to start new cities of their own, which
could hardly be of any use to pastoral raiders. That is, the contribution
of the Aryans had its negative feature. It took at least half a millennium
for the new types of production to reach an urban stage. Much was lost
that the older society had developed.
The later Rgvedic stage shows recombination of Aryans with
pre-Aryans or non-Aryans. The new tribes continued to fight vigorously
among themselves. Divodasa means ‘ servant of heaven’, but Dasa was
then a non-Aryan tribal name too. The termination makes it likely that
here is not merely abstract devotion to heaven, but that a Dasa had
been adopted into the Aryan fold ; there may be more than one
Divodasa in the Rgveda, the most famous being called atithi-gva, he
whose cattle are welcome to graze wherever they like. His successor king
Sudas (later written as Sudasa ; the earlier form means ‘ the good
giver’) Paijavana brings us to the greatest political upheaval in the
later stratum of the Rgveda, the battle against the ‘ Ten Kings’. These ten
kings are given only by the tribal names, many of which are demonstrably
Aryans. The tribe of Sudas was the Trtsus, a sub-group of the Bharatas
from whom derives the name Bharata for the whole of India. The fight is
repeatedly mentioned in passing (say RV. 7.83.6), but in greater detail