285:9 No notice is taken here of a curious legend which is given in the Mahábhárata, in the Gadá Parvan. It is there said, that during a great drought the Brahmans, engrossed by the care of subsistence, neglected the study of the sacred books, and the Vedas were lost. The Rishi Sáraswata alone, being fed with fish by his mother Saraswatí, the personified river so named, kept up his studies, and preserved the Hindu scriptures. At the end of the famine the Brahmans repaired to him to be taught, and sixty thousand disciples again acquired a knowledge of the Vedas from Sáraswata. This legend appears to indicate the revival, or more probably the introduction, of the Hindu ritual by the race of Brahmans, or the people called Sáraswata; for, according to the Hindu geographers, it was the name of a nation, as it still is the appellation of a class of Brahmans who chiefly inhabit the Panjab. (As. Res. VII. 219, 338, 341.) The Sáraswata Brahmans are met with in many parts of India, and are usually fair-complexioned, tall, and handsome men. They are classed in the Játi málás, or popular lists of castes, amongst the five Gaura Brahmans, and are divided into ten tribes: they are said also to be especially the Purohits or family priests of the Kshatriya or military castes: (see the Játi málá, printed in Price's Hindi Selections, II. 280:) circumstances in harmony with the purport of the legend, and confirmatory of the Sáraswatas of the Panjab having been prominent agents in the establishment of the Hindu religion in India. The holy land of the Hindus, or the primary seat, perhaps, of Brahmanism, has for one of its boundaries the Saraswatí river: see p. 181, n. 7.

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Hinduism

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