Rig Veda

The text is a samhita, a collection: 1,028 hymns totalling roughly 10,600 verses, grouped into ten books called mandalas. Books two to seven are the family books, each traditionally ascribed to a priestly lineage, Gritsamada, Vishvamitra, Vamadeva, Atri, Bharadvaja, Vasishtha, and their internal consistency of style and metre marks them as the oldest core. Book nine is different in kind: every hymn in it addresses Soma in the act of being pressed and filtered. Books one and ten sit at the edges and are, on linguistic grounds, the latest material in the collection.

Indra takes the largest share, some 250 hymns, a god of storm, intoxication and the slaying of the serpent Vritra. Agni takes around 200, and stands first in the collection because fire is the mouth by which offerings reach the gods. The theology is not systematic. Hymns address gods as supreme in turn, a habit Max Muller labelled henotheism.

Two of the most cited hymns are late. The Nasadiya Sukta at 10.129 asks how the world came to be and closes by suggesting that even the overseer in the highest heaven may not know. The Purusha Sukta at 10.90 describes the cosmos made from the dismembered body of a primal man, and gives the four social orders their oldest scriptural warrant, a passage that has carried enormous weight in later Indian argument about caste, precisely because it is scriptural and precisely because it is a single verse.

The Rig Veda proper is only the innermost layer. Around it accreted Brahmanas explaining the ritual, Aranyakas for forest recitation, and Upanishads. All of these count as shruti. The Rig Veda survives complete in a single recension, the Shakala, out of a number the tradition remembers having.

Nobody can date the Rig Veda by excavation, because it names no site that has been dug and matched. The dating that holds academic consensus is linguistic. Rig Vedic Sanskrit is markedly more archaic than the Sanskrit of the Brahmanas, which is in turn older than classical Sanskrit as codified by Panini around the fifth or fourth century BCE. It is also strikingly close to the language of the older Avesta, the Iranian scripture, close enough that whole lines can be converted between the two by regular sound rules. That relationship, plus the rate of change visible across the Vedic corpus itself, puts composition around 1500-1200 BCE, with the family books earlier and books one and ten later.

The material world the hymns describe is consistent with that. They know the horse and the spoked-wheel chariot, cattle wealth, and rivers of the Punjab and the Sarasvati. They do not know iron, do not describe cities of the Indus type, and show no interest in the coastal south. What they call ayas appears to be copper or bronze.

Against this stand traditional and revisionist chronologies. Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued in 1893 from astronomical references in the hymns for a date near 4500 BCE; other writers, in what is usually called the Out of India position, place the Vedic corpus in the third millennium BCE and identify its composers with the Indus Valley civilisation, in order to deny any Indo-Aryan migration into the subcontinent. The astronomical arguments depend on reading precise observations out of allusive poetry, and the linguistic evidence, the shared Indo-Iranian inheritance in particular, runs the other way. The disagreement is real, and in India it is political as well as scholarly, but the weight of the evidence sits with the linguists.

The single most remarkable fact about the Rig Veda is not its age but its condition. It was transmitted orally, and the tradition built engineering to stop it drifting.

Students first learn the samhitapatha, the continuous text with all the euphonic joins of sandhi applied. They then learn the padapatha, the same text with every word separated out and every compound resolved, an analysis, in effect, that fixes the word boundaries the continuous recitation blurs. On top of that sit the permutation recitations. Kramapatha takes words in overlapping pairs. Jatapatha braids each pair forwards, backwards and forwards again. Ghanapatha, the hardest of the eleven recognised styles, weaves groups of three in a fixed pattern of reversals. Every word is thereby recited in several different neighbourhoods, so a slip in one position is exposed by the others, and the pitch accent, which classical Sanskrit lost, is preserved with it.

The result is a text whose recensions across the whole subcontinent differ by remarkably little, at a distance of three millennia. The manuscript record, by contrast, is thin and late: the oldest surviving copies, from Nepal, are of about 1040 CE, some two and a half thousand years after composition. Writing arrived in India long before then, and was deliberately not used for this. Recitation was the ritual act; a written Veda was, in some formulations, no Veda at all.

The first printed edition was Friedrich Max Muller's, issued at Oxford between 1849 and 1874 with Sayana's fourteenth-century commentary. UNESCO proclaimed the tradition of Vedic chant a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in November 2003, by which time the number of reciters holding a full Veda in the harder styles had fallen sharply.