Mandala 2 opens the sequence of family books, Mandalas 2 through 7, each traditionally composed and transmitted within a single hereditary line of poet-priests and widely regarded by scholars as the oldest, most tightly organized stratum of the entire Rig Veda. Its 43 hymns are credited to the Gritsamada family and follow the standard family-book arrangement, opening with hymns to Agni, the sacrificial fire, before moving through Indra, the storm god and warrior who dominates more Rig Vedic hymns than any other deity, and on to the Vishvadevas, the "all gods" invoked collectively.
The hymns are dense with the concerns of the sacrificial ritual itself, correct invocation, the pressing and offering of the sacred Soma drink, and requests for cattle, sons, long life and victory in battle, the practical concerns of a pastoral, cattle-herding society whose religious life centered on maintaining right relationship with powerful, personified natural and cosmic forces. As the shortest mandala, Gritsamada's book has often been read by scholars as showing the family-book pattern in its most compact, legible form, useful precisely because its brevity makes the underlying structure, deity by deity, easier to trace than in the longer family collections that follow it.