GN Devy explores what we can learn about the Vedic Indo-Aryan language from its use in the Rig Veda

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15 hours ago

The unique creation of Sanskrit was an unparalleled oral tradition far surpassing instead of creating any orthographic system. More or less the same time when the Indo-Aryan language started evolving its first branch in South Asia were emerging the ancient Greek (1450 BCE), ancient Chinese (1250 BCE), Aramaic (1100 BCE), and Hebrew (1000 BCE). Some other languages, beginning with Egyptian, had already developed their scripts. These include: the Sumerian, Hattic, and Elamite language isolates, Hurrian from the small Hurro–Urartian family, Afro–Asiatic in the form of the Egyptian and Semitic languages, and Indo-European such as Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek. Besides, there are some scripts such as the Proto-Elamite script, the Indus script, Cretan hieroglyphs, Linear A, and the Cypro–Minoan syllabary, awaiting to be deciphered. Of course, writing cannot be considered the only proof of the existence of an ancient language. For example, the oldest Avestan texts – the Gathas – are believed to have been composed before 1000 BCE, but the oldest Avestan manuscripts date from the 13th century BCE.
The Vedic Indo-Aryan language created literary records in the form of the Vedas, but for generations, it continued to be transmitted entirely orally. Not all oral traditions in human history are mere assemblages of chance stories and songs. Not all oral societies can be dismissed as 'primitive'. The pastoral bands which became the bridge between the Indo-European and India were certainly not primitive. They had already evolved well-organised social conventions, particularly the contract system between the host and the guest (the yajaman system), well-set methods of alliances (marriage within one's 'kula' and 'gotra'), and ritual offerings to divinities. Besides, they had developed remarkable traditions of poetry and myth – which subsequently surface in the epics in Greece and India.
David W Anthony observes, 'Their social system was maintained by myths, rituals, and institutions that were adopted by others, along with the poetic language that conveyed their prayers to the gods and ancestors. Long after the genetic imprint of the original immigrant chiefs faded away, the system of alliances, obligations, myths and rituals that they introduced was still being passed on from generation to generation.' The oral poetic creation of the earliest of the Vedic singers, therefore, was not made of a chance and sentimental outburst. It was already rooted in a tradition of myth, cosmology, and a world view. The Rig Veda gave the cosmology, myth, and ritual an unparalleled mechanics of memory. English Indologist Ralph TH Griffith, in his preface to The Hymns of the Rigveda, observes:
Rhyme is not used in the Rigveda. The meters are regulated by the number of syllables in the stanza, which consists generally of three or four Padas, measures, divisions, or quarter verses, with a distinctly marked interval at the end of the second Pada, and so forming two hemistiches or semi-stanzas of equal or unequal length. These Padas most usually contain eight or eleven or twelve syllables each; but occasionally they consist of fewer and sometimes of more than these numbers. The Padas of a stanza are generally of equal length and of more or less corresponding prosodic quantities: but at times two or more kinds of meters are employed in one stanza, and then the Padas vary in quantity and length. As regards quantity, the first Syllables of the Pada are not subject to very strict laws, but the last four are more regular, their measure being generally iambic in Padas of eight and twelve syllables and trochaic in those of eleven.
The verses are organised, in ascending order, in terms of 'rik' (verse praising a deity), 'sukta' (a small group of mantras or verses), 'anuvak' (a complete section containing several suktas or sub-sections), and 'mandala' (a 'book' as in an epic or a set of suktas). There are ten mandalas, 85 anuvaks, and 1,028 suktas in the Rig Veda (or Rik-veda), constituting a total of 10,552 'mantras'. Scholars tend to think that it may have taken a century or a little longer to develop this vast body of Vedic verses.
Since then, for the last 33 centuries, the entire corpus gets recited in Ved-pathshalas (where a disciplined recitation of Vedas is taught from generation to generation) by committing it to memory, literally syllable by syllable, almost entirely in the same way as its original composers – the makers of these richas or the rishis – may have recited them three millennia ago. The architecture of the verses – their meters, syllabic arrangement, caesuras, rhythm – was moulded to make their memorisation possible for any well-trained reciter of the corpus. The amazing mnemonics have hardly a parallel.
The ingenuity of its method perhaps can be compared with the method which the German polymath Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) invented, in another continent and in another time, for bringing taxonomies used in diverse disciplines under the rubric of a single 'universal knowledge'. However, I would like to add that the analogy is not intended to support any absurd claim about the Rig Veda having anticipated modern computers resulting out of Leibniz's method; it is purely to underscore the remarkable insight which the composers of the Veda had into the nature of human memory. A profound understanding of the interlocking of the poetic meter and the working of memory was the principal feature of the Vedic mnemonics.
In order to grasp the genius of the Vedic poets, it may help to mention that English poetry works mainly within five meters: iambic, trochaic, and spondaic having two-syllable feet; and anapaestic and dactylic having three-syllable feet. Compare these with the amazing range of the Vedic meters such as, principally, the Gayatri, Ushnih, Anushtubh, Brihati, Pankti, Trishtubh, Jagati, and additionally, the Atijagati, Shakkari, Atishakkari, Ashti, Atyashti, Dhriti, Atidhriti, Kriti, Prakriti, Akriti, Vikriti, Sanskriti, Atikriti, and Utkriti.