[62] This is an instance of suttee in ancient India worth noting.
[63] The modern Allahabad and, at that time, probably a frontier town of the Aryan invaders.
[64] “The traditional site of this event is in the Allahabad district, on the left bank of the Ganges, three miles south of Handia Taksil. The village of Lachagarh (Laksha = lac) is said to take its name from this event. It stands on the bank of the river, which is never cut away by the stream. This is said to be due to the melted lac which keeps the earth together. People come to bathe on the Somwati Amawas when the new moon falls on a Monday. Jhusi or Pratishtapur, the capital of the Chandraransi Rajah is twenty-four miles from there.”—North Indian Notes and Queries, August, 1894, p. 89.
[65] I don’t think it is at all unlikely that cannibalism prevailed in India at this early period, as it does in Africa to-day, and these stories are only the Hindu bard’s exaggerated way of recording the fact.
[66] Karna had been brought up in the family of a Suta or charioteer and was reckoned as belonging to that caste.
[67] From this story of Draupadi it seems evident that polyandry was practised at least in parts of ancient India; as, indeed, it is to this day, in portions of the Himalayan region. That it was not very uncommon in the old-time we may gather from a remark, attributed to Karna, in reference to Draupadi herself—“women always like to have many husbands” (“Adi Parva” of the “Mahabharata,” section cciv.).
[68] “Again the site of Indraprasta is far more distinctly indicated than the site of Hastinapur. The pilgrim who wends his way from the modern city to Delhi to pay a visit to the strange relics of the ancient world, which surround the mysterious Kutub, will find on either side of his road a number of desolate heaps of the débris of thousands of years, the remains of successive capitals which date back to the very dawn of history, and local tradition still points to these sepulchres of departed ages as the sole remains of the Raj of the sons of Pandu and their once famous city of Indraprasta.”—Wheeler’s “History of India,” vol. i., p. 142.
[69] Such is the Hindu poet’s conception of the court of Yama, the god of departed spirits, a delightful place where there is no lack of sensuous pleasures. He places amongst the attendants in this court “all sinners amongst human beings;” but as, according to Brahmanical theology, there is punishment for the wicked, we may presume that the sinners referred to are only temporary sojourners in this pleasant abode, awaiting their trial and the judgment of Yama upon their deeds.
[70] Pratibhindhya, Sutasoma, Sutakarna, Shotanika, and Srutasena.
[71] It would appear that only one of the armies—that which proceeded northward—went outside the limits of India, to the countries immediately beyond the Himalayas. India, with the region just referred to, was, for the poets of the “Mahabharata,” the whole world. On this point see Dr. Rajendra Lalla Mitra’s “Indo-Aryans,” vol. ii., pp. 9-12.