[142] Vol. II. pp. 246-288.
[143] See Mœurs, Institutions et Cérémonies des Peuples de l’Inde; par M. l’abbé J. A. Dubois, ci-devant missionnaire dans le Meissour. Paris, 1825. This work was first published in the English language, London, 1816. It had been translated from the author’s French manuscript, which lord William Bentinck, governor of Madras, purchased on the account of the East India Company, in 1807. This composition received the approbation of major Wilks, resident of Maissour, sir James Mackintosh, and William Erskine, Esq.; to which I am happy to add the most decisive judgment of the honorably-known Brahman, Ram Mohun Roy, whom I often heard say: “The European who best knew the Hindus, and gave the most faithful account of them, was the abbé Dubois.”
[144] See vol. II. p. 201.
[145] The celebrated Ram Mohun Roy had abandoned all the tenets, but remained as much as possible attached to the customs, of his Brahminical caste.
[146] His Works, vol. IV. p. 16.
§ V.—Retrospect of the Persian and Indian Religions.
I have endeavored to trace the most remarkable features of Persian and Indian religions from among those which are contained in the Dabistán. In them we recognise resemblances, and, in more than one point, even coincidences, which appear not merely taken from each other in the course of time, but rather originally inwoven in the respective institutions. This may be explained, partly by the general probability that nations, passing through the same stages of civilisation, might agree in several parts of religion, politics, and philosophy, and chiefly by the fact, now generally admitted among the learned,[147] that in very remote times, a union of all the Arian nations, among whom the Persians and Indians are counted, existed in the common regions of central Asia. Sir W. Jones[148] goes so far as to say: “We cannot doubt that the book of Mahabad, or Manu, written in a celestial dialect, means the Veda.” William von Schlegel most ingeniously surmises,[149] “that the name of Zand may be but a corruption of the Sanscrit word chhandas, one of the most usual names of the Vedas.” The fourteen Mahabadians are to him: “Nothing else but the fourteen Manus, past and future, of the Brahmanical mythology.”[150] Thus we should have to thank Mohsan Fani for a confirmation of the above-stated historical fact; the Mahabadians were nothing else but Mahabodhis, in good Sanscrit, “great deified teachers;” he would have placed them, as did lately Burnouf, Lassen, and Charles Ritter, somewhere on the highlands of Iran, and he invented nothing.
From the ante-historical dynasties descending to later times, let us consider that, according to respectable traditions,[151] there existed friendly and hostile relations between Iran and Persia in the time of the Iranian king Feridun, 1729 years before our era: he reconducted with an army a fugitive Indian prince, and rendered India tributary. Two other invasions took place under the Persian monarch Manucheher,[152] after which the Indians recovered their liberty. Under Kai Kobad[153] flourished Rustum, who ruled, beside other countries, Sejistan and Kabul, conquered the Panj-áb, and carried war into the bosom of Arya varta. This country was also attacked by Afrasiab, a Turan prince,[154] then possessor of Persia. Ferdusi’s Shah-namah indicates expeditions of Feramurs, a son of Rustum, to India, under the reign of Kai Khosrú. We arrive at the epoch of Gushtasp, who ordered the Indus to be explored, and although he had not, as Herodotus asserts,[155] conquered the Indians, he entertained religious relations with that nation. After Alexander’s conquest of Persia, Sassan, the son of Dara, retired to Hind, where, devoted to the service of God, he died.[156] After a very obscure period of Persian history, Ardeshir, directed by a dream, brought an offspring of Sassan from Kabulistan to Istakhar. We cannot doubt that at all times a communication was open between Iran and India, where Bahram Gor married an Indian princess, and whence Nushirvan received a celebrated book and the game of chess. In our seventh century, the Muhammedan Arabians, driven by the spirit of conquest, turned their arms towards India, but stopped on the borders of the Indus. It was reserved to Muhammedan Moghuls, mixed with Persians, to establish in the midst of India an empire which, after eight hundred years, disjoined by various disorders, fell into the hands of the English.
This rapid sketch is perhaps sufficient to explain any mixture, fusion, and resemblance of Persian and Indian doctrines and institutions, if even we were not disposed to seek their fountain-head in the sacred gloom of the remotest antiquity. Whatever it be, in any case, it will no more be said, that the Dabistán was written “with the intention to claim for Persia the pre-eminence over India, concerning the antiquity of religious revelations.”[157] In fact, Mohsan Fani never explicitly alludes to a comparative antiquity between the Persians and Indians, and implicitly acknowledges the anteriority of the Indian religion over the Zoroastrian, in a part of Persia at least, by relating that Gushtasp was converted from the former to the latter by Zardusht, by whom also the Indian sage, Sankhara atcharya, was vanquished.