Sacred mysteries
Why the Rigveda has resisted decipherment
fhe place in literary history of the earli-
est Indo-European poems remains
unrecognized. Composed long before
Homer’s /liad and Odyssey, they
form an anthology of over 1,000 songs of
considerable merit and sophistication, celebrat-
ing the power and beauty of the natural world.
Traditionally known as the Rigveda, these
poems, in an archaic and unfamiliar language,
were handed down in prehistoric India as a
sacred mystery, and ancient assumptions about
their subject matter played a vital role in
the development of Indian religious ‘thought.
Translators, however, still have difficulty mak-
ing sense of many of them. As with other sup-
posedly religious texts, any challenge to funda-
mental beliefs is invidious. But I suggest that
these important poems continue to appear not
to make sense because a significant part of their
vocabulary has always been mistranslated.
How and where they were composed is
unknown. Believed to be of divine origin, this
body of material was passed down by a priestly
elite, its incomprehensibility, but highly metri-
cal form and poetic style, making it ideally
suited to ritual recitation. Many centuries later
it was adopted by the new religion, Hinduism,
as its most ancient sacred text.
The language of the Rigveda is the earliest
surviving form of the Indian branch of the Indo-
European family of languages. It is commonly
known as Sanskrit, but the language described
by the word “Sanskrit” came several hundred
years later, and there are considerable differ-
ences. Classical Sanskrit is characterized by sty-
listic peculiarities that make it very different
from the ancient languages of Europe, and from
the vernacular of these poems. It was a schol-
arly language, written according to rules laid
down by a grammarian, Panini, who flourished
some 400 years BC. Like medieval Latin, it was
a lingua franca, and had to be studied and mas-
tered. The name Sanskrit, which dates from
Panini’s time, means “perfected, cultivated”, as
opposed to Prakrit, “natural, vernacular”.
Because its form had been prescribed at an
eatly date, Sanskrit was unable to change and
develop in the way that natural languages con-
stantly do. Writers resorted to a range of contriv-
KAREN THOMSON
ances in an attempt to avoid the exigencies of
a grammar that was no longer natural to them.
The simple adjectival past participle came to be
preferred as a way of representing past tense:
not “I led the horse” but “the horse is having-
been-led by me”. Massive compounds, words
strung together in stem form to avoid the neces-
sity for inflection, became the mark of a highly
developed literary style. The description of
an eminent king at the beginning of the
Paficatantra, a collection of fables generally
dated to around 300 AD, “his feet were red-
dened with the mass of rays from the jewels in
the crowns of foremost kings”, is a single
adjective; the king is literally “foremost-king-
crown-jewel-ray-mass-reddened-foot-paired”.
The very length of the compound is honorific.
The analysis of such compounds calls for aige-
braic, rather than linguistic skill. “Classical”
Sanskrit, in other words, is a somewhat mislead~
ing name. The language of what is regarded as
the great period of Sanskrit literature lacks
much of the grammatical sophistication that we
associate with an ancient classical language.
The language of the Rigveda, as the earliest
poetry is traditionally known, is very different.
It was a rich and varied vernacular, with a
wealth of nominal and verbal forms. Like
ancient Greek, it had a musical accent, which
no longer exists in Classical Sanskrit. Its
compounds are of the familiar Homeric kind:
“weapon-armed”, “lovely-handed”. Some of
the words in its vocabulary survive into Classi-
cal Sanskrit, but a large number are unfamiliar
to scholars of the later language. It is as differ-
ent from Classical Sanskrit as the language of
Beowulf is from modern English.
The endeavour to “wrench” sense from the
text, as Professor Stephanie Jamison recently
put it, is itself ancient. The earliest surviving
attempt was composed around 500 BC. Its
author, Yaska, quotes extensively from the
poems, so that we know that they have
remained unchanged for well over 2,000 years.
He cites an assertion, made by a sceptic named
Kautsa, that “the poems of the Rigveda have no
meaning”, which he tries to refute in his study.
Catherine Scallen
