92 KajendraMla Mitra— On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. [No. 1 



quite flat, stale, and unprofitable. The great object of the legend, whether 

 it be intrinsically true or false, was to extol the merits of the hymns in res- 

 cuing a victim from a sacrificial stake ; but if the stake be divested of its 

 horrors, that object would be entirely defeated. Then, if Harischandra 

 did not intend actually to give up his son to Varuna, the promise to " sacri- 

 fice his son when born" would be unmeaning, and the frequent evasions he 

 resorted to, by saying, " an animal is fit for being sacrificed when it is more 

 than ten days old" ; " it is not fit for sacrifice until it has teeth" ; " it is not fit 

 until the milk teeth are shed" ; " it is not fit until the permanent teeth are all 

 come out" ; " a man of the warrior caste is fit for being sacrificed only after 

 having received his full armour", were quite uncalled for, and gratuitous 

 attempts at cheating a dread divinity whom he adored, and to whom he was 

 bound by a solemn vow ; for he could have at any time easily subjected 

 the son to the ceremony of being tied to a stake, and after repeating a 

 few mantras over him let him off, perfectly sound in wind and limb. The 

 running away of the son from his father would also be unmeaning; 

 the purchase of a substitute stupid ; the payment of a fee of a hundred 

 head of cattle to undertake the butcher's work quite supererogatory ; and 

 the sharpening of the knife by Ajigarta a vain preliminary. The Brah- 

 mana makes S'unahsepha express much disgust at the sight of Ajigarta, 

 his father, sharpening a knife to slaughter him. " What is not found even 

 in the hand of a S'udra", it makes him say, " one has seen in thy hand, the 

 knife to kill thy son" ; but it has not a word in depreciation of the rite itself. 

 It is said in the Brahmana that S'unahsepha, after his rescue, was so dis- 

 gusted with his father that he forsook him, and became the adopted son of 

 Visvamitra, who named him Bevardt or Diodotus, "the god-given", and 

 became the head of one of the several branches of the descendants of 

 Visvamitra. S'unahsepha was a grown-up man at the time, and was perfect- 

 ly familiar with the S'astras, for he is described to have, immediately after, 

 officiated at the ceremony, and to have introduced some innovations in the 

 ritual ; if the whole rite were purely symbolical, he had no business to be 

 offended with his father, a learned Brahman of high caste, and become the 

 adopted son of a Kshatriya. 



The writer of this note claims to be a descendant of this Devarat, and, 

 in common with a large number of men in different parts of India, at every 

 solemn ceremony, is required by the S'astras and the custom of his ancestors 

 to describe himself as belonging to the tribe (gotra) of Visvamitra, and of 

 the family (pravara) of Devarat ; he is not prepared, therefore, to say that 

 S'unahsepha is purely a mythical personage ; and seeing that, until the 

 beginning of this century, the practice of offering the first-born to the river 

 Ganges was common, and the story simply says that S'unahsepha was 

 offered to the water-god Varuna as a substitute for the first-born Eohita, 



