352
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
they can here find a thoroughly trustworthy and accurate, though brief, account of all the ancient Vedic rites.
Information of this nature has hitherto
been obtainable only from rare Sanskrit MSS. or scattered and, to the general public, inaccessible, articles in scientific German periodicals. In pp. 20 48 the learned author gives the essential parts of each of the twenty-one sacrifices according to the usual arrangement, and he also gives copious reference to the S r a ut as ū tra printed and MSS. the Brāh m an as and Safi hit as, with very appropriate ex planations of the meaning and purpose of the rites.
[Nov. 1, 1872.
The Indian sacrificial rites are very numerous and often exceedingly complex ; they therefore form a very uninviting object of study. But some know ledge of them is necessary to all who would under stand even the modern Sanskrit literature and Hindu
ideas, and Mr. Kittel's tract will, I think, be found the most useful aid to be had at present by students who cannot have recourse to the original texts. The object of this “Tract" is purely Missionary, but the description of the Vedic rites is of general interest, and is throughout well done. A. B.
CORRESPONDENCE AND MISCELLANEA. WAS SIHARAS THE SAME AS S'RI’HARSHA.?
SIR,--I do not know whether the Siharas of the
Chachnāma, (Sir H. Elliot's Hist. of India, p. 153) has ever been explained to mean Sri Harsha, but it appears to me that it would be a very natural Pra krit form of that name.
events he describes could have been so grossly mis informed about quite recent occurrences. W. C. BENETT,
Gondah, Oudh, 26th January 1872.
The loss of the R and the
change of S into S are very common phenomena, illustrated by the conversion of the Sanskrit Srā vasti into the Prakrit Sãwattha.
I therefore ven
ture to suggest that Siharas of Kanauj is really
GINGER.
As regards Ginger, the derivation of which Col. Yule asks about (I.A. p. 321), it is supposed to be
from the Sanskrit Srirgavera (see Colebrooke,
Sri Harsha as pronounced in the local dialect with
which the author of the Chachnāma was brought into connection.
Now if this Sri Harsha was Harsha
vardhana the second, the predecessor of Hiwen Thsang's Silāditya (and the name of his father as given in the Chachnāma, Rāsal, looks suspiciously like a corruption of Rajyavandhana, whom we know to have been the father Harshavardhana II.) it is obvious that the Chachnáma is guilty of a gross anachronism in making him fight with an uncle of Rai Dāhir of Sindh.
A marakosha, II. ix. sºl. 37), but this is derived from the Malayālam name of the plant, and the Greeks probably took it direct from the same. In Malabar green ginger is called in chi and in chiver is from inchi, ‘root.’ Inchi was probably in an earlier form of the language s iſ chi or c hiſ chi, as we find it in Canarese stills' fi n ti. Ginger is chiefly ex ported even now from Malabar, and in earlier times the Greeks procured it almost exclusively from that province, so that there is every probability that the name is Dravidian and not Sanskrit.
The date of the composition of the Chachn ma is involved in obscurity, but it appears to me that this argument makes it very unlikely that it could have been before the death of Mahammad Kásim.
There
If we look at
the form of the Sanskrit word, it is impossible to doubt that it is a foreign word altered by the Brah mans, who, by their pedantry, disguise all they meddle with.
are other facts tending to throw suspicion on the book, such as its romantic stories, and the bien trouvé name of Budhiman for the prime minister of Chach. The only possible way out of the difficulty that I can suggest is that Sri Harsha might have been used as a family name for the Bais Kings of Kanauj, and refers to the last of the series Jayádit
ya, but there is nothing whatever to show that this was the case, and the name Răsal, as well as the existence of another family name Aditya, makes the supposition unlikely. This anachronism relates to an event which at the outside could not have occurred more than
thirty years before the Arab conquest of Sindh, and I have invariably found oral tradition pretty accurate in its chronology for at least eighty or a hundred years. Beyond that, of course, it gets wild in the extreme. It is not likely that the author of the Chachnāma, if he was co-temporary with the
A. C. BURNELL.
Mangalore, Oct. 17th, 1872. -
BELGAM FAIR.
FAIRs in honour of Lakshmi are very common in the Southern Marātha Country. They are celebrated once in two years in almost all large places. The fair of Belgäm however surpasses all the others. It takes place every twelfth year. The goddess Lakshmi is held in great veneration by the common people; but this goddess is not the same as that cele brated in Purānas. The tradition about the origin of this fair is as follows:—
A son of a Māhār left his home and went to a
village where he used to pass through a street, on one side of which was the house of a Brahman who
taught boys to recite the Veda. The Māhār's son
