CULTURAL TRANSACTION AND EARLY INDIA 5 as the son of a dasi in turn married a dasi whom he found, it is said, among strange people in the east and she was mother to his son, the respected rsi Kaksivant. Evidently these brahmans took the rule of exogamy literally and married far out. But equally intriguing is the origin of the compiler of the Mahabharata, the learned Veda Vyasa. His father, the rsi Parasara became enamoured of a girl of the fisherman's community as she rowed him across the river. In spite of her fishy odour he made his intentions clear. She resisted him at first but finally accepted his advances when he promised that she would be rid of the odour offish. The boat was enveloped in a discreet curtain of clouds and the sweet-scented girl eventually gave birth to Veda Vyasa. The ambiguity of his mother's origins are further complicated by the story that she had been an apsara's daughter abandoned as a foundling among the fisher folk.2 And this becomes a stereotype among such origin myths raising a host of questions regarding the treatment of identity. What are we to make of this ? First of all and certainly that our ancestors had a sense of humour and were willing to invent stories about these lapses from the normative perspective of even those whom they revered—a quality which is difficult to find in contemporary India for such stories would be unheard of today. But what is more important and once we get past the symbolic meaning, is that obviously origins do not have to conform to normative rules and were possibly not very significant. This is even more marked in the origin myths of a variety of royal families claiming ksatriya status in the post-Gupta period.3 Prior to the Gupta dynasty the Puranas refer to such families being of brahman and even sudra origin. Few in fact were ksatriya in spite of the insistence of the normative texts on ksatriya origins of ruling families The myths of many such families of the later period as those of the Guhilla and Candella make one suspect that the families may have been obscure and they sought status through fabricated genealogies linking them to the Suryavamsi and Candravamsi lineages, which lineages seem also to have been an invention of a particular historical time. In shying away from coming to terms with this divergence we blind ourselves to the possible flexibility of a society which in certain situations was probably as important a characteristic as (he theoretical insistence on the minutae of rules of social behaviour. We thereby provide a simplistic explanation fof a complex arrangement. The concession to the brahman that he could marry into any varna was in some ways parallel to the incorporation of belief and ritual from a variety of sources in the making of religious sects, an incorporation which defies the forcing of what we call Hindu sects into a homogenous, uniform, clearly identifiable and eclesiasti-cally organised religious entity and this epitomises a perspective different from that of the Semitic model. But what are we to make of high culture literature which mocks the brahman ? In the plays of Kalidasa the vidusak^—ibe stereotype of cow-