Chapter 9 - Fate and Human Endeavour

Summary

BEFORE plunging into the main theme of this chapter viz. the relative positions of fate and human endeavour as presented in the scriptures, we shall once again probe into the nature of fate itself. Life for the toiling masses in anciént India, as everywhere else, was hard and bitter. The Aryans came as a nomadic pastoral people; cattle was their base of subsistence, roots and fruits supplemented their food, as did hunting. When they had virtually subjugated an urban agricultural and trading people their ethos first clashed with, then was overwhelmed by it and finally it assimilated some part of the subjugated people. What was this ethos? We have no records of the indigenous non-or pre-Aryan peoples. Our sole source is first the Ṛgveda Saṃhitā and then the slow and steady changes ushered in the Yajurveda, the Brāhmanas and finally the Atharva Saṃhitā. These changes can to some extent be ascribed to the miscegenation and the cultural amalgamation of the two peoples. Whatever other differences they may have had, the fact that life was difficult and fraught with many dangers persists throughout. Even when the invaders had learned to cultivate and to make houses with kiln-burnt bricks, nature posed many problems for them—there were floods, droughts, locusts, bad feuds, harvests, plagues, epidemics among men and cattle, earthquakes, forestfires, tempests, etc. Many were the threats to life and property for these early settlers here. Chance, the unapprehended, was thus taken for fate which was behind such insecurity and was responsible for such accidents.