To any such criticisms I make answer that for nearly all our knowledge as to the methods and tackle of fishing and varieties of fish we are indebted to the Greeks and Romans, and in a smaller degree to the Egyptians and Chinese.
Reasons of date, data, and dearth of paper prevent my using in this book the material which I had collected on Indian, Persian, and Japanese Fishing.
As regards India, while fishing by net falls well within my adopted date (500 a.d.), that by hook and line—not necessarily Angling—gains entrance by a short head, or a mere century.
Fish (matsya, apparently derived from the root mad and signifying the inebriated) is down to c. 1000 b.c. only mentioned once[85] in the Rigveda, X. 68, 8. In the next period—that of the later Vedas and Brāhmanas—fish, but not methods of capture, find frequent mention.
The Net (jāla) is first referred to in the Atharvaveda (not later than 800 b.c.) but not in connection with fishing, while in the Yajurveda (c. 800 b.c.) names for fishermen and a hook—baḍiša—occur. The 139th Jātaka (c. 400 a.d.) contains the first allusion to fishing with a line and hook.
References in Sanskrit poetry to the iron hook and bait probably imply, though they fail to mention, the Rod. Passages in the epic Mahābhārata, V. 1106 (c. 200 a.d.), in Kāmandaki’s aphoristic poetry (c. 300-400 a.d.), in the Pancatantra, I. 208, “when women see a man caught in the bonds of love, they draw him like a fish that has followed the bait,” all suggest Angling.[86]
Fish legends, similes, stories—not always redounding to ichthyic wisdom—meet us fairly frequently. Manu[87] is saved from the Flood by a fish. Buddha[88] answers questions as to abstention from fish. Wondrous fish occur: e.g. the Kar, “which knows to the scratch of a needle’s point by how much the water in the Ocean shall increase, by how much it is diminishing.”[89]
Stories, such as the recovery by a fish of Šakuntalā’s ring and the consequent marriage of King Dushyanta; of Indra, the fearless slayer of the serpent, whose death for defiling the bed of Ahalyâ was compassed by fish;[90] of Adrikâ’s transformation into a fish and her conception in that form of a child by King Uparicaras;[91] of The Stupid and Two Clever Fishes;[92] of The Frog and The Two Fish,[93] all these make pleasant if varied reading. But when we come to methods of fishing, all variety vanishes. We are confronted with a damnable monotony, a toujours perdrix. It is almost Net, or Nothing.
This holds true of the piscine tales even in the Arabian Nights, e.g. The Fisherman and the Jinn, and The Fisherman and the ’Efreet. The latter, however, possesses an unique interest: the fisherman here, unlike his Greek and Roman poverty-stricken brethren, became by means of his miraculous fish, “the wealthiest of the people of his age, and his daughters continued to be the wives of princes”!
Evidence that fishing in India was of old and is now (the fishing caste, I am told, ranks low) not highly regarded can be deduced (inter alia) from its total omission in the Fourteen Sciences and the Sixty-four Arts, which the Vātsyặyana Kāma Sūtra (not later than the third century a.d.) promulgates for the education of children from five to sixteen. Among the requisite Sciences gymnastics, dancing, the playing of musical glasses, sword-stick, cock quail and ram fighting, teaching parrots and starlings to sing, all these find commendation, but fishing none!