DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

102 ARYAN AND NON-ARYAN BRAHMINS [4.5
Under the circumstances, the formation of the caste deserves some attention
; the successive changes it underwent must be considered in their proper
setting.
There is good reason to believe that the first brahmins were a result
of interaction between the Aryan priesthood, and the ritually superior
priesthood of the Indus culture. There are innumerable gotras in seven
main divisions of the brahmins, each of which must marry outside its
own gotra, which thus corresponds to the Latin gens. The word
gotra is good Sanskrit, its original meaning of cow-pen being the exclusive
Rgvedic sense of the word. It is known that each particular gotra had
its own mark for branding cattle, which were therefore held in common ;
later, when the unit of common holding became the joint family, which
still survives in many parts of India, the significance of gotra changed
correspondingly to mean ‘ household’ as well as ‘ clan’. It was the
form of property which gave its unity and name to the human group
holding it in common. Even when land became property, cattle still remained
a measure of wealth positively correlated to the amount of land held.
In theory, each of the seven larger groups or any sub-group thereof
betokens common descent from a rsi sage, whose name the gotra still
bears. In effect, however, the actual number of these ancestral sages
cannot be made seven by any system of counting ; there exist at least
two distinct lists of the ‘ seven’ of which the older seems to have little
relation to the developed brahmin clan system which remains. It
might be supposed that the ‘ seven’ go back to the seven rivers and
perhaps to the ancient Mesopota-mian seven sages.
Evidence for non-Aryan brahmins is that some of them are called
sons of their mothers, by name : Dirghatamas, who came to grief at the
hand of Traitana, is son of Mamata, a dasi; the father is variously
Usij or Ucathya. Aryans by birth are, in the RV., sons of their fathers
without mention of the mother. So, the legend is comprehensible that
the blinded Dirghatamas floated eastward dowft the river, to find honour
among strange people, as Indus priests might have tried’ to do. The
reproach ‘son of a dasa woman’ was levelled against other vedic seers.