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dasyu
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Also called:
dasa
Related Topics:
India
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dasyu

ancient people
Also known as: dāsa, dasa-bhritaka
Written by
Charles Preston
Charles Preston is Associate Editor for Religion at Encyclopædia Britannica.
Charles Preston
Fact-checked by
Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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History

dasyu, in the Rig Veda, a member of a group of people defined as the enemies of the Aryas. The Aryas are what the composers and reciters of the Vedas and practitioners of Vedic religion called themselves, and the autonym has been translated as “noble” or “civilized.” Vedic verses that mention the Dasyus and the Dasas—a group with whom the Dasyus often overlap—invoke the Vedic gods to defeat them for the Aryas in battle. Portrayals of the Dasyus often mention their failure to practice Vedic religion and their tendency toward trickery, evil and demonic activities, and general inhumanity. However, there are instances in the Rig Veda where at least some Dasas, more so than Dasyus, appear less as enemies and more as marginal figures incorporated within Vedic civilization.

There are certain passages in the Rig Veda that describe the Dasyus as “dark” or “black” (Sanskrit: krishna). This description led many scholars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to believe that the Dasyus and Dasas represented a racial group distinct from the Aryas, which they further read as evidence supporting a racialized version of the Aryan invasion and migration theories. However, many scholars today reject this racialized reading of the Dasyus and Aryas. Instead, Rig Vedic descriptions of Dasyus’ darkness are now often understood as poetic devices, echoing ethically coded dark-light imagery elsewhere in the Rig Veda, that point to Vedic views of Dasyus’ moral and religious deficiencies. In short, on this reading the Dasyus and Dasas are described as dark insofar as they are the enemies of the Aryas, and not in terms of physical appearance.

Similarly, earlier scholarly translations describing the Dasyus as “noseless” (Sanskrit: anāsa) were initially interpreted as indicating racial difference, but the term is now understood as a description of the Dasyus’ differences in speech and language compared with Vedic Sanskrit. In later Sanskrit the term dāsa came to mean “servant,” which some earlier Indological scholars further connected with the social class system called varna, in which servants (called Shudras) were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Although varna can mean “color,” most scholarship today understands varna in the sense of “category” and has largely discredited the notion that varna status was based on skin pigmentation.

Charles Preston