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dharmyāddhi yuddhācchreyo ‘nyat katriyasya na vidyate.

yadcchyā copapannam svargadvāram apāvtam

sukhina katriyā pārtha labhante yuddham īdrśam.

atha cet tvam ima dharmya sangrāma na kariyasi

tata svadharmam kīrtim ca hitvā pāpam avāpsyasi.

akīrtim cāpi bhūtāni kathayiyanti te’ vyayām

sambhāvitasya cākīrtir maraād atiricyate.

Looking to your own duty too, you must not flinch;

for there is nothing better for a Kshatriya than a righteous fight.

Blest are the Kshatriyas who gain such a fight,

offered unsought, O Partha, as an open door to heaven.

But if you choose not to carry on this righteous conflict,

then discarding personal duty and glory, you will fall into sin.

Beings will tell of your eternal dishonour

and, for a respectable man, dishonour is worse than death.

Bhāgavad Gītā, ii.31-4

Being a Hindu god, Krishna does go on to ground this exposition of the heroic code within a theology of reincarnation and a theory of knowledge that reduces the world of action to a shadow-play of appearances; but the basic ethic of nobility expressed through courage and military prowess is clear.

It is usually presumed that it was this attitude to life, together with the dominating technologies of warhorses, wheeled vehicles and metal weapons, which spread Aryan lordship and language across northern India, and then kept the various kingdoms in an almost constant roil of mutual warfare over this period. (This model of language spread is, after all, well attested in many parts of the world in the historical period, as when the Normans brought Norman French to England, or the conquistadores brought Spanish to Central and South America.)

But besides the battles recounted in Sanskrit epics there is very little evidence, from archaeology, inscriptions or indeed from indigenous tradition, that the language was spread with fire and sword. Particularly in India, there is an ingrained belief that Hinduism and Sanskrit are not the result of alien invasions, but developed rather wholly within the subcontinent. There has even been a recent attempt to give this story a full quasi-mythological backing, developing the theory that, if there are linguistic and genetic links with the rest of the Indo-European language family, this is due to the spread of the Aryans round Europe before their return to their true home of India.23

Whatever the truth of the Aryans’ prehistoric wanderings, there is a lot that shows that horses were important to them from the beginning. In the Hittite libraries of central Anatolia (2500 miles to the west of the Indus) we find a manual on horsemanship and chariotry, written by Kikkuli the Mitannian in the mid-second millennium BC: he gives his profession as assussanni-, which can be equated with the Vedic Sanskrit aśvasani ‘gaining or procuring horses’, and his text is full of loan words which are evidently Indo-Aryan: courses can be aikawartanna, terawartanna, panzawartanna, sattawartanna, nawartanna, ‘1-, 3-, 5-, 7- or 9-turns’, which is just Sanskrit eka-, tri-, pañca-, sapta- and nava-vartana. Most Mitannians spoke a completely unrelated language, Hurrian, but in another text written in this language at much the same time (from the city of Nuzi—Yorgan Tepe—in northern Iraq) horse colours are given in something close to Sanskrit: babru (babhru), ‘chestnut’, parita (palita), ‘grey’, pinkara (pingala), ‘roan’.

Here the Aryan elite culture of the horseman had been superimposed on a populace that spoke another language. The evidence stems from long before and far away; but the situation of the early days of Aryan language in India was probably very similar. This can be seen even within the structure of Sanskrit itself.

Sanskrit and its related Indo-Aryan languages are different from all their relatives to the north and west, in Iran, Russia and Europe, in possessing an extra series of consonants, known to Sanskrit grammarians as the mūrdhanya (’in the head’) sounds, or to Westerners as the retroflex stops, after the position of the tongue: , , h, h and with the tongue curled backward against the roof