[7]. This memoir was written in 1813-14, and may contain many inaccuracies, from its very remote situation, and the difficulty of obtaining correct information. [Reni is 120 miles N.E. of Bīkaner city, and is said to take its name from a legendary Rāja Renpāl.]
[8]. [Few of these names are traceable on modern maps.]
BOOK VII
ANNALS OF JAISALMER
CHAPTER 1
Limits of Jaisalmer.
The Bhatti Tribe.
It were preposterous to expect to find, in the annals of a people so subject to the vicissitudes of fortune, an unbroken series of historical evidence in support of this ancestry; but they have preserved links of the chain which indicate original affinities. In tracing the Yadu-Bhatti history, two hypotheses alternately present themselves to our minds, each of which rests upon plausible grounds; the one supposing the Bhattis to be of Scythic, the other of Hindu origin. This incongruity may be reconciled by presuming the co-mixture of the two primitive races; by enlarging our views, and contemplating the barrier, which in remote ages separated Scythia and India, as ideal; and admitting that the various communities, from the Caspian to the Ganges, were members of one grand family, having a common language and common faith,[[2]] in that ancient central empire whose existence has been contended for and denied by the first names in science;[[3]] the Bharatavarsha of the Hindus, the Indo-Scythic empire of king Bharat, son of Budha, the ancestor of the Yadu-Bhattis, now confined to a nook of the desert.[[4]]
It would be vain to speculate upon the first colonization of India proper by the Rajkula, or ‘royal tribes.’ It appears to have possessed an indigenous population prior to the races of Surya, or Indu, though the genealogies which give the origin of these degraded races of Kabas,[[5]] Bhils, Meras, Gonds, etc., assert that they were all from the same stem, and that their political debasement was the effect of moral causes. But as there is no proof of this, we must attribute the fable to the desire of the Brahman [218] archaeologist to account for the origin of all things. Modern inquiries into these matters have been cramped by an erroneous and contracted view of the power of this ancient people, and the direction of that power. It has been assumed that the prejudices originating in Muslim conquests, which prevented the Hindu chieftain from crossing the forbidden waters of the Attock, and still more from “going down to the sea in ships,” had always existed. But were it not far more difficult to part with erroneous impressions than to receive new and correct views, it would be apparent that the first of these restrictions is of very recent origin, and on the other hand, that the Hindus of remote ages possessed great naval power, by which communication must have been maintained with the coasts of Africa,[[6]] Arabia, and Persia, as well as the Australian Archipelago.[[7]] It is ridiculous,
Since Mr. M. wrote, the revelation of the architectural antiquities in these isles, consequent to British conquests, establishes the fact that they were colonized by the Suryas, whose mythological and heroic history is sculptured in their edifices and maintained in their writings. Nor should we despair that similar discoveries may yet disclose the link which of yore connected India with Egypt, and to which Ceylon was but the first stepping-stone. That Rama possessed great naval means is beyond doubt, inherited from his ancestor Sagara ‘the sea-king,’ twenty generations before the hero of Lanka, which place I have long imagined to be Ethiopia; whence ancient writers assert Egypt to have had her institutions, and that the Ethiopians were of Indian origin. Cuvier, quoting Syncellus, even assigns the reign of Amenophis as the epoch of the colonization of Ethiopia from India.—P. 180 of his ‘Discours,’ etc. [For early Hindu voyages to Java and the neighbouring region see Smith, HFA, 259 ff.; BG, i. Part i. 489 ff.] with all the knowledge now in our possession, to suppose that the Hindus always confined themselves within their gigantic barriers, the limits of modern India. The cosmography of the Puranas, imperfect and puerile as it is, and some of the texts of Manu, afford abundant evidence of an intimate intercourse between the countries from the Oxus to the Ganges; and even in their allegories, we trace fresh streams of knowledge flowing into India from that central region, stigmatized in latter days as the land of the Barbarian (Mlechchha). Manu corroborates the Puranas, from which we infer the fact that in distant ages one uniform faith extended from Sakadvipa, the continent of the Sakae, to the Ganges.[[8]] These observations [219] it is necessary to premise before we attempt, by following the tide of Yadu migration during the lapse of thirty centuries, to trace them from Indraprastha, Suryapura, Mathura, Prayaga, Dwarka, Jadu-ka-dang (the mountains of Jud), Bahra, Gajni in Zabulistan; and again refluent into India, at Salbahana or Salpura in the Panjab, Tanot, Derawar, Lodorva in the desert, and finally Jaisalmer, founded in S. 1212, or A.D. 1156.