Page:History of India Vol 1.djvu/156

116 to the conquest of Ceylon by a king of the Kosalas who had married the daughter of Janaka, King of the Videhas. This poem, like the Mahabharata, is utterly valueless as a narrative of historical events and incidents. In both the heroes are myths pure and simple.

Sita, the field furrow, had received divine honours from the tune of the Rig-Veda and had been worshipped as a goddess. When cultivation gradually spread in Southern India, it was not difficult to invent a poetical myth that Sita was carried to the south. And when this goddess and woman had acquired a distinct and lovely individuality, she was naturally described as the daughter of the holiest and most learned king on record, Janaka of the Videhas.

But who is Rama, described in the epic as Sita's husband and the King of the Kosalas? The later Puranas tell us that he was an incarnation of Vishnu, but Vishnu himself had not risen to prominence at the time of which we are speaking. Indra was still the chief of the gods of the Brahmanic and Epic Period, and in the Sutra literature we learn that Sita, the furrow goddess, is the wife of Indra; it seems, therefore, that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, is, in his original conception, only a new form of Indra battling with the demons of drought. Myth is thus mixed with the epic which describes the historic conquest of Southern India.

But though the Ramayana is utterly valueless as a narrative of events, still, like the Mahabharata, it throws side-lights on the state of ancient society in India, and the story of the epic therefore needs to be