The Earliest Sakas of South Asia (An Old And Rare Book)

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The three lectures presented here are a homage to the memory of a great scholar, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal, a barrister by profession but a devoted scholar, who made valuable contributions to Indological studies. But more than that, he was a source of abiding inspiration to many young Indologists. I consider it an honour to have been invited by the K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute to deliver the Memorial lectures marking his birth anniversary in 1993. I have chosen a subject keeping in view K.P. Jayaswal's interest in the foreign elements of India's history and culture. He had contributed a paper on the Sakas and Parthians as early as 1919 in the Indian Antiquary, vol. xlviii and he touched upon the subject again in a broader context in his studies on the Yuga Purana (JBORS, 1928. 1929).

The Sakas, known to the Western literary sources as the Skythians (Scylhians), were one of the major groups of Indo- European speaking peoples, spread over a vast area of Central Asia. My lectures deal with the identity, origins and early movements of only those among them who lived in more easterly parts of their nomadic world and who, pressed by various circumstances, had to move more than once to the northern and north-western regions of South Asia to seek new habitat. Their immigrations in South Asia were of momentous consequences and they proved yet another source of enriching the melting pot of Indian civilization.

The Sakas dealt with here cover a span of time extending over almost the whole of the first millennium B.C. I have shown that they entered South Asia in two main phases separated by about half a millennium from each other. The circumstances of their entry, and consequently of their movements, into the region vary in nature and content. Moreover, theirs was not one straight movement lock, stock and barrel, violent or non-violent. They were more in the nature of relay movements, or infiltrations. But once they moved in, there was no going back "home." They integrated themselves with the local elements and became part and parcel of the land and the people.