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historical figures but merely personifications of certain Recurrences and situations. Sita, in the first place, whose abduction by a giant demon and her subsequent recovery by her husband Rama, constitute the plot of the entire poem, is but the field-furrow to whom divine honors were paid in the songs of the Rile and in the Grihya ritual. She accordingly represents A.ryan husbandry, which has to be protected by Rama—Whom I regard as originally indentical with Balarama ^halabrit^ c the pZwigh-bearerJ though the two were afterwards separated— against the attacks of the predatory aborigines. These lattei appear to be demons and giants ; whereas those natives who were well-disposed towards the Aryan civilization are represented as monkeys—a comparison which was doubtless not exactly intended to be flattering and which rests on the striking ugliness of the Indian aborigines as compared with
the Aryan race."
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IT. /?. C. £>«#.—" The Ramiyana is utterly valueless as a narrative of historical events and incidents. The heroes are my ths, pure and simple. Sita, the field-furrow, had received divine honors from the time of the Rig Veda and had been worshipped as a goddess. When cultivation gradually spread towards Southern India, it was not difficult to invent a poetical my th that Sita %as carried to the south. And when this goddess and woman—the noblest creation of human imagination—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 !
u But who is Rama, described as Sita's,husband and King of tifoe Kosalas ? The later Puranas tell us he was an incarnation, of Vlshnu-^bmt Vishnu himself had not risen to prominence;