Note 161 — Volume II. (continued 2)

5. Thirdly, this intermixture of castes comes out very clearly in the earlier legends of the race. Thus we find that the Angirasas, or sons of Angiras, were Brâhmans as well as Kshatriyas. So the descendants of Garga, although Kshatriyas by birth, became Brâhmans.161 In the Mahâbhârata Bhîma is married by his brother Yudhishthira to the Asura woman Hidimbi, and the marriage rites were regularly performed, and Draupadi, a Kshatriya girl, accepts as a husband in the Swayamvara Arjuna, who pretends to be a Brâhman.162 According to a passage in the Mahâbhârata163 all castes become Brâhmans when once they have crossed the Gomati on a visit to the hermitage of Vasishtha. The Brâhman Drona acts the part of a Kshatriya in the great war. Kakshîvat was the son of Dirghatamas by Usij, a female servant of the Queen of the Kalinga Râja, whom her husband had desired to submit to the embraces of the sage in order that he might beget a son. The Queen substituted her bondmaid Usij. The sage, cognisant of the deception, consecrated Usij, and begot by her a son named Kakshîvat, who through his affiliation to the Râja was a Kshatriya; but as the son of Dirghatamas was a Brâhman.164 So Visvâmitra, a Kshatriya, by the force of his austerities, compelled Brahma to admit him into the Brâhmanical order in order that he might be on a level with Vasishtha, with whom he had quarrelled.165 Even up to the time that Vasishtha wrote the legality of a twice-born man marrying a Sûdra woman seems to have been at least arguable.166 Numerous instances of similar mutability of caste in comparatively modern times might easily be given.167