For the starting point of my
research of the history of our family lineage I decided to choose exactly that
point of reference till which my grandfather had been able to trace the line
into our previous generations, and that point of reference was where the first
ever roots of the lineage hailed from: the ancient city of Kanyakubja!
Not that I was immediately
successful in being able to trace a line of our forefathers in Kanyakubja,
beyond the names already cited in my grandfather’s research, but what offered
itself was a splendid tale of this ancient city, meandering leisurely in and
out of history and mythology which was captivating enough that at some point
the fine line separating the two seem to blur.
While I attempt in this section
of my research article, to present the story of Kanyakubja, the revered city of my
forefathers’, centuries ago, I do so with a caveat. My research in this area,
for understandable reasons, have been totally bookish, the sources of which
however remain well validated. I have gained most of the information from a few
Sanskrit books (the Indian epic Ramayana,
the Puranas and a few others) detailing the times and references to
Kanyakubja in various eras and ruled by many kings, about whom we have read in
both Indian mythology and history. These books, which I was very fortunate to
stumble upon recently in the small library in our Calcutta home that my aunt
Jharna had bequeathed to us, also had the Sanskrit paragraphs explained in
Bengali alongside thus making it possible for me to understand from. For once
while reading these books, as I became deeply engrossed in the mythological
tale of Kanyakubja, I regretted not perhaps having taken up Sanskrit as my
elective subject way back in college when I did have such an opportunity.
Coupled with my reading of the
mythological references to Kanyakubja, I also found strong validated mentions
and descriptions of the ancient city in some books on the ancient Indian
history (periods from 180 BC through till 1019 AD). Thus, we now have the
knowledge from where our family lineage was born and in what historical
environs it developed over the centuries to come down to the time of 753 AD
where it blends or joins with the specific line for our Gautama Baidik family as defined in my grandfather’s notes (refer
my blog: The Search: Research Series Part 1).
We will take a detour here to
speak about the history and mythological connections of Kanyakubja, as that has
direct context and bearing to the mainstream line of the family we are out to
investigate and establish.
The Ramayana times (10th Century BC,
during the Treta Yuga) and before –
The coordinates of Kanyakubja as
mentioned in many Indian mythological texts is briefly as follows:
Jamboodweep (Asia), Bharat
Khand (India), Aryavarta desh
(The land of the Aryans, mainly denoting the northern part of India), Vindhyachaley uttorey (to the north of the
Vindhyachal mountains).
The Valmiki Ramayan, Bal-khand,
Sargas 2 and 31 to 33, gives us a brief history of Kanyakubja and how
the city came to get its name as such. When rishi Vishwamitra and Lord Ram
reached the banks of the Son River
near the ancient city of Girivraja,
Lord Ram asked the rishi where they were, to which the great rishi told him
about the location and history of the land:
One of Lord Brahma’s descendants
was a King named Kusha, who had four sons by his wife Vaidarbhi, viz.,
Kushamba, Kushanabha, Asurtharaj and Vasu. King Kusha asked his sons, when they
grew up, to rule like a true Kshatriya
(warrior) ruler and for that they set up four cities in different parts of the
kingdom. Kushamba’s city was named Kaushambi,
Kushanabha built Mahodayapura,
Asutharaj built the city Dharmaranya
and Vasu called his city Girivraja.
Amongst the lot, over course of time, only Kushanabha ruled according to the
true Kshatriya practices and hence
his city Mahodayapura flourished and
soon many of his brothers’ cities also formed a part of his growing kingdom.
The kingdom was mostly comprising of what we today can identify as the Indo-Gangetic
plains.
Mahodayapura was the capital city of King Kushanabha and his
glorious kingdom was called Madhyadesh
(the central land). It was so named, chiefly because it occupied the central
portion of the Aryavarta of the
ancient times, with the Vindhyachal mountain range setting its barrier to the
south, beyond which the Aryans had
not ventured till that time.
King Kushanabha had a hundred
daughters by his wife Ghritachi (also an apsara),
and all of them were divinely beautiful. As they grew up to be exquisitely
charming maidens, Vayu the wind god
was infatuated by them but was rudely rejected by the maidens. In his anger and
humiliation Vayu cursed the hundred daughters of King Kushanabha for their haughtiness,
as a result of which the daughters developed hunches on their backs, thus
deforming their once so praised physical beauty. Vayu told the King that the
curse could only be lifted and the divine beauty of his daughters restored, if
a Brahmin of upright character married
them.
The news of the curse and the
fate of the hundred princesses spread like wildfire in the city and across the
kingdom. The city Mahodayapura soon became
to be called “the city of the hunchback maidens” or ‘Kanyakubja’! (Kanya – daughter; kubja – hunchback). Thus
was acquired the name which stayed on as long as the city stood in its glory
across the centuries.
As the King went in frantic
search of such a Brahmin, he heard of the sage Chooli who had set up his abode in the forests nearby and was
meditating there. As the King approached the sage, he observed the sage’s son
who was a young man and carried a certain halo about his persona. Upon meeting
the sage, the King enquired if his son was married and when the sage replied in
the negative, he promptly explained his predicament and proposed the marriage
of his hundred daughters with the sage’s son Brahmadutt. Soon was the marriage was conducted and the moment Brahmadutt
touched his hunch-backed wives, their hunches and deformity disappeared and
their divine beauty was restored, thus ending the curse of Vayu. However, the
name Kanyakubja stuck on and the city was thereafter always referred to by this
name.
Rishi Vishwamitra though ended
his story about the naming of Kanyakubja to Lord Ram, now surprised the exiled
prince (Ram) by narrating his own connection and ancestry to the city of
Kanyakubja.
King Kushanabha performed the ‘putrakamesti yajna’ in the hope of
having a son who would be the future ruler, and was blessed with a son called
Gadhi who, mythology states, was known to have qualities like Lord Indra, the
King of Heaven and of the Gods. Some text versions in mythology also mention
that Gadhi was an incarnation of Lord Indra himself who was mighty pleased with
the devotion of King Kushanabha and was born to him as his son. Gadhi ruled the
kingdom with great valour and pomp and had a daughter, Satyavati, and a son, Vishwarath.
Vishwarath ruled in Kanyakubja after his father for some time as a powerful Kshatriya (warrior) king until he gave
up his kingship and turned ascetic. Rishi Vishwamitra himself was none other
than the erstwhile ruler of Kanyakubja, King Vishwarath, and the direct grandson
of the mighty King Kushanabha.
On a related note, it is equally
interesting to learn about the connection of Kanyakubja to another very famous
mythological character of the same times, who traces his ancestry to the city
and to the line of the Lunar Dynasty Kings. It is the story of the ancestry of
Lord Parashurama, who is also believed to be the sixth incarnation of Lord
Vishnu appearing in the Treta Yuga. King
Gadhi’s daughter Satyavati was married to a Brahmin sage Richeek and their son
was rishi Bhargava Jamadagni who, although a Brahmin sage by birth and vocation, had Kshatriya-like warrior qualities. Parashurama is the son of
Bhargava Jamadagni and had inherited both the Brahmin-Kshatriya qualities from his father in abundance. Parashurama
is famous as the slayer of the Kshatriyas and a master of the usage of the
fearful Brahmastra (the most powerful
and destructive weapon of Lord Brahma the creator, as described in Indian
mythology).
After Vishwamitra abdicated the
throne of Kanyakubja, Astaka another son of Gadhi became King of Madhyadesh and ruled over Kanyakubja.
The last reference in the mythological texts about Kanyakubja is the mention of
King Lauhi, Astaka’s son who rules after his father in King Kushanabha’s line.
Kanyakubja re-emerges significantly on the scene, later in the times of the
Indian epic Mahabharata (10th
Century BC). In later historical references we find Kanyakubja described as a
mighty city during times of the Gupta Empire (240 AD). During King Harshavardhan’s
time (606 – 647 AD) the city had its most glorious period, standing as the
capital of Harsha’s empire of undivided India.
We shall continue on the legends
and history of Kanyakubja in the next article of our Research series as there
is still much to know about this ancient city and its fate in the subsequent
eras of history.
The
Kanyakubja Brahmins –
The mythological texts and
legends of the Vedic period say that the great Brahmin sage Brahmadutt continued to stay in Kanyakubja city and had
many children by his hundred wives who were the daughters of King Kushanabha of
Kanyakubja. Brahmadutt’s descendants were the original Kanyakubja Brahmins who
started the lineage of resident Brahmins in Kanyakubja as over the years they
stayed in the city glorifying it as an important seat of Vedic learning and
preaching knowledge. These Brahmins and their next generations down the line we
priests in the royal courts and temples and teachers of the Vedic texts in
different educational institutions of the time. They were referred to as ‘Acharya’
and ‘Upadhyay’ as per the titles bestowed upon them by the Kings. The
Kanyakubja Brahmins, as we shall see in our treatise on the later history of
Kanyakubja, were the keepers of the Vedic knowledge and the mainstay in
spreading Vedic education across the kingdom.
Therefore it would not be
logically improper to assume that our forefathers came from this line of Kanyakubja Brahmins, though any chances
of tracing a name beyond Jahnukar in
the specific family lineage seem utterly impossible at this day.
The Brahmins developed the system
of ‘Gotra’ meaning ‘lineage’ which is
maintained patrilineal. Each gotra
takes the name of a famous Rishi or sage from whom the lineage is said to have
started in a patrilineal manner. Gotras
are present for all people and not only for the Brahmins. However, in the
earliest Vedic times, there were also instances of people attaching themselves
to a particular Rishi or sage whose life and god-like qualities they had chosen
to model themselves on. Thus a lineage (gotra)
would have directly started from a Vedic rishi by ancestry or by adoption as in
the case of a disciple adopting the name of his guru (the Vedic rishi) as his
own ‘gotra’.
Whilst on one hand mythology
states that the entire Kanyakubja Brahmin clan emanated from Brahmadutt on the paternal
side and the hundred daughters of King Kushanabha of the Lunar Dynasty on the
maternal side, there is no clear explanation of the allotment of the Gotras to the clan. However, we know
that there are 26 Principal Gotras
for the Kanyakubja Brahmins, which include direct and indirect lineages of the ‘Saptarshis’ (the seven sacred Rishis to
whom the Vedas were first explained). These Saptarshi’s
were: Atri, Vasistha, Kashyap, Gautama,
Bhrigu, Bharadwaja and Jamadagni. Later, Vishwamitra was added to the group when
he was classified as ‘Brahmarshi’ (the
superior-most attainment by a rishi in their levels of knowledge and penance) by
Vasistha. Therefore, based on the concept
of Gotras and the fact that the
Kanyakubja Brahmins were by generations the keepers of Vedic texts and
learning, we can assume that they would have aligned their Gotras to their Vedic guru’s from whom the initial Vedic learning was
derived. Thereafter the patrilineal concept of the ‘gotra’ would have followed
in the respective families.
Why the question of Gotra becomes so important here and the
quest for a logical answer to how the lineage derived the Gotra, is solely because our family lineage is classified as the ‘Gautama Baidik’ clan. This essentially
means that our line owes its ‘gotra’ allegiance
to Rishi Gautama, who was one of the Vedic Saptarshis.
(Baidik being the localised version
of Vedic). This explains the ‘Gautama gotra’
of the family which we still use today for all rituals and worship and that the
lineage came from the Brahmins who studied and preached Vedic texts and
knowledge in ancient Kanyakubja.
The tale and history of
Kanyakubja intertwines multiple times with the lineage of our family
forefathers and it was where their first abode was and it was from Kanyakubja
that the family line historically originated.
Prequel (times from ages of mythological
creation of India up to the 10th Century BC) –
The mythological references to King
Kusa (father of King Kushanabha) states that he was the 10th
descendant generation of Pururavas, the first King of the ‘Somavansha’ or ‘Chandravansha’
- the Lunar Dynasty in the Aryavarta lineage.
Pururavas was the son born to Ila, daughter of Vaivaswat Manu (son of Lord Brahma
and the King of mankind) and the celestial god Budh (Mercury). Budh (Mercury)
was the son of Soma (the Moon) as stated in mythology; therefore the Dynasty
which Pururavas (grandson of Soma) started was the Lunar Dynasty. It was from
the Manu that both Suryavansh (Solar
Dynasty – through his son Ikshvaku) and Chandravansh
(Lunar Dynasty – through his daughter Ila) emanated.
Pururavas and his wife Urvashi
had 6 sons: Ayus, Dhiman, Amavasu, Viswavasu, Satayus and Srutayus. It is said
that Pururavas ruled over the Prayag (modern day Allahabad) region. At his
time, the kingdom was called ‘Pratisthana’.
It was from Pururavas and his Lunar Dynasty lineage that the Kauravas and the Pandavas of the Indian epic Mahabharata
descended. Pururavas’ Lunar Dynasty was prominently taken forward by two of his
sons Ayus and Amavasu. Ayus continued to succeed his father and rule from Pratisthana while Amavasu moved away to
settle in a new land closer to the northern belt of the Ganges.
It is Amavasu’s line that we will
enumerate in our research, as the prime line of the Lunar Dynasty, and given
below are the names of the Kings who succeeded their fathers in the Lunar Dynasty:
Amavasu > Bhima* > Kanchana
> Suhotra > Jahnu** > Sumanta > Ajaka > Balakeshava > Kusa
> Kushanabha*** > Gadhi > (Gadhi
was succeeded by his son Viswarath or Vishwamitra briefly, and later by his
other son Astaka, as we have seen in our earlier treatise)
[It was from King Kushanabha’s
100 daughters and fathered by the great brahmin Brahmadutt, that the Kanyakubja Brahmins had descended, to
which line belonged our forefathers… Thus it can be said that our family line
firmly belonged to the Somavanshi or Chandravanshi line - the Lunar Dynasty
of Aryavarta, from the maternal side.]
It was from the time of King Kusa
and later King Kushanabha that the concentration of the kingdom came by to Madhyadesh with Kanyakubja as its
capital city.
Footnotes-
Bhima* - not to be confused with the Bhima of the
Pandavas of Mahabharata. Probably the Pandava son was named after the former King
Bhima of the Lunar Dynasty.
Jahnu** - There is a mythological legend about King
Jahnu which goes as follows: King Jahnu was a benevolent king and very inclined
to practising of knowledge and spirituality and spent much of his time in
discussion with sages and taking part in holy ritualistic activities in their
ashrams. It was during one such yajna (worshipping ritual) that King Jahnu was
performing at a sage’s ashram when the River Ganges started flooding its banks
and threatened to wash out the sage’s ashram. King Jahnu, enraged at the floods
and the interruption to his yajna, is said to have drank up all the water of
the Ganges and stopped the flood. However, upon frantic pleas from the Gods and
other sages, he released the Ganges back from his body to flow into the river
path. Coming from King Jahnu’s body, the River Ganges thus derived another name
as ‘Jahnavi’.
It had been a common practice all over, to name new born children upon
the illustrious people of the land or in the ancestry, and accordingly it would
not be improper to assume that our forefather Jahnukar may have been named
after the great King Jahnu of the Lunar Dynasty line.
Kushanabha*** - we have spoken in detail about King
Kushanabha in our above treatise on the founding of the city of Kanyakubja.
King Kushanabha is thus famous not only as the founder of the city but also as
the grand sire of the maternal side of the line of the Kanyakubja Brahmins.
Coming Soon…. Research Series Part 3
In the next article of the
Research Series, we trace the history of Kanyakubja during the times of the
Mahabharata (3rd Century BC) and then its later history from the Gupta
Empire period (240 AD) till the Muslim conquest and destruction of the city in
1019 AD. We shall see how historical events had impacted the society in
different eras and what finally happened to the Kanyakubja Brahmins and our family
line amongst them.
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