Rig veda 1

 

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