Jamison And Brereton: The Rigveda
The Introduction of the Book
In the introductory chapter of The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (2014), authors Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton (henceforth J and B) claim that India’s religious literature reflects on the ability of mortals to contact and affect the divine and cosmic realms through sacrifice and praise. The two translators write that after fifteen years of effort on the translation and more than forty years of working with the text, they laid down the essentials of the Vedas in the introduction. They acknowledge that the Rigveda, in an archaic form of Vedic Sanskrit, is the oldest Sanskrit text. But they hasten to clarify that though it is old, it is not the most ancient, as it stands at the end of an Indo-European long tradition of praise poetry.
There are four Vedas: the Rgveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda, with individual priests Hotar, Udgatar, and Adhvaryu attached respectively to the first three. The Atharvaveda apparently stands outside of this ritual system and consists of hymns of a more “popular” nature, often magical or healing. The authors, using diffuse arguments, including the absence of metals like iron, place the Rigveda within the period 1400-1000 BCE or within the second half of the second millennium BCE. There is a strong need to confirm the Aryan invasion theory, which allegedly happened around 1500 BCE, and the Rigveda was produced within the next few centuries.
This dating is important because any dating of the Vedas before 2000 BCE collapses the Aryan theory completely. The foundation of Indological scholarship rests heavily on the Aryan theory. Rejecting the Aryan theory leads to the collapse of numerous aspects of Indological scholarship. The authors also claim that internal chronology suggests a movement of peoples from north-west regions (Russian Steppes, as per recent consensus amongst Aryan proponents) to the east (India). Shrikant Talageri says otherwise, contradicting the authors’ claims. As Talageri demonstrates in his books (The Rigveda, an Analysis, and The Veda and the Avesta), the Vedas predate 2000 BCE, and the Rigveda provides ample evidence of migration from north-west India, encompassing present-day Haryana and Punjab, to further westward, eventually spreading to other parts of Europe, a phenomenon known as the Out-of-India migration. The Aryan proponents consistently ignore or even ridicule scholars and archaeologists such as Koenraad Elst, David Frawley, Nicholas Kazanas, BB Lal, James Shaffer, KD Sethna, and many others who have either refuted the Aryan invasion/migration scenario or supported the Out-of-India migration (OIT) theory. Problematically, there is not a single shred of archaeological evidence to show any kind of Aryan invasion of India. However, for western Indologists, there is a driving need to confirm this theory of invading Aryans.
J and B make an extraordinary claim that “the text did not directly address the religious lives of women or of other social classes, nor indeed even other aspects of the religious lives of elite males. However, we can gather information on non-elite concerns and on the daily life and pursuits of the elite incidentally, often through similes or imagery.” (italics mine) The question would be, if Rigveda is indeed a religious text, why should one be trying to find ethnological clues about non-elite classes or of women? This was one of the criticisms of Sri Aurobindo against European scholarship more than a century ago.
The authors write that the majority of Rgvedic hymns have as their major aim to praise the god(s) to whom the hymn is dedicated and to induce said god(s) to repay the praise with requested favors. “There is an all-pervasive system of reciprocity and exchange that might be termed the dominant social ideology underlying the Rgveda.” Therefore, the Rigvedic hymns essentially boil down to a harsh negotiation between humans and gods. The purpose cannot get more material since it is principally for the “good things”—wealth, a long lifespan, and defeating opponents. How does this extraordinary power originate? It is the “power of the word.” They do not clearly state whether this is simply a belief or whether the word truly has the power to bring about tangible results. However, they allow the akhyana hymns to be of a special type, not intended for ritual use, but more philosophical. These were apparently the forerunners of the Brahmana and Aranyaka texts that interpret the rituals. They frequently use phrases and placeholders in their interpretation of the Rigveda, such as “Perhaps,” “maybe,” and “could have been.”
They claim that the poets have an elaborate patronage system. They are “superior” hirelings and provide the praise poetry that the patron needs to put the gods in his debt! Such silly explanations and speculations make up for the introduction of the holiest of Indian scriptures. This only reveals their utter ignorance of the metaphysics of Indian thought and the incorrect paradigm they appear to be operating under. One cannot approach a culture whose inbuilt philosophy begins with the Self (Consciousness or Brahman) and the multiplicity arising from it using a materialistic philosophy that places the notion of Self or consciousness as secondary to matter. The incommensurability of paradigms arises when one attempts to explain the other. The authors do exactly this and, in the process, end up causing immense epistemic damage to the text. What they do not understand becomes a matter of discrepancies, confusions, and ambiguities on the part of the Vedic Rishis.
Writing about its history, they use the authority of a western Indologist, Michael Witzel, to claim that the complete collection of the Rgveda was under the Kurus of ancient India. The closed circle of scholarship, in which one western scholar quotes another, ignoring the traditional commentaries, is characteristic of Indological scholarships beginning with the Germans. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee demonstrate this phenomenon in excellent detail in their classic The Nay Science, in which they deconstruct the German Indology enterprise.
J and B discuss the early “freezing” of the text, highlighting its significant value in understanding the linguistic, religious, and literary history of South Asia. In addition to Sri Aurobindo’s criticism of the Rigveda’s use as a social text for clues about people, another problematic aspect is the inherent notion of the “evolution” of texts. This notion of evolution of thoughts and texts, typical of European scholarship, is something that clashes inherently with the Indian idea of the Rigveda. For the Indologists studying the text, there is an evolution of thoughts, keeping in mind a linear progression of history from the primitive to the advanced. According to Sri Aurobindo, the Vedas represent the highest state, while the thoughts represent the most evolved. The passage of time actually signifies a decline in both the culture and the complexity of thought. Clearly, intellectual violence ensues when the two paradigms meet.
The authors then make a claim about Indian traditional commentary systems by saying that “later Vedic texts do carry “commentary” but are based more on adaptation, speculation, or fancy than on a direct transmission of the purport of the text.” They acknowledge that Sayana, who made the most influential and lasting commentary on the text in the fourteenth century CE in South India, outperformed many earlier works and continues to play a significant role in both indigenous and Western interpretations of the text. Interestingly, Sri Aurobindo severely criticised Sayana because his flawed interpretation served as the foundation for all subsequent erroneous European scholarship.
J and B argue that the Rgveda transmission has remarkably well preserved the text, making it trustworthy and uniform. However, the commentaries fail to live up to this claim. They mention the commentaries of Max Muller, Theodor Aufrecht, N. S. Sontakke, Louis Renou, Wendy Doniger, and Walter H. Maurer, but they apparently create a distorted view of the Rigveda. However, the authors point out that over the past fifty years, research on the Rigveda has significantly advanced our understanding of the text. Rather than attempting to emend the texts as previous scholars did, twentieth-century scholars recognised a much better understanding of the text by accepting it as it was transmitted. They write, “We too are committed to accepting the traditional text and, more importantly, to allowing the poetry of the Rgveda to remain complex, elusive, jagged, unsettled, and even unsettling.” There is absolutely no mention of Sri Aurobindo, Ananda Coomaraswamy, or the need for a guru to understand the Vedas.
The authors explain that a web of equivalences among elements in the ritual, cosmic, and everyday realms structures the Vedic universe. These homologies, or hidden connections, give the priests the power to manipulate the universe through ritual manipulation. These are the authors’ explanations for the power of rituals. Do gods really exist? Do the priests actually control them through the power of the word? Or is it just a belief that bards, laypeople, and kings have held for thousands of years? Typically, the arguments oscillate between these powers as “facts” and “beliefs.”
As a typical example of the most materialistic interpretation of the Vedas, they write about the Soma ritual, apparently the target of most hymns of the Rgveda. Soma juice, the central rite of this sacrifice, was an offering to the gods to be shared by male participants in the rite. They stop short of regularly placing the Avestan before the Vedas, but they are keen to suggest that they share a common origin. They write that the haoma plant is the Iranian Avestan equivalent to the Soma plant. The authors claim that they have more textual evidence to support the interpretation of the Soma juice as a stimulant than as a hallucinogen. Sri Aurobindo would have surely laughed his head off with such an interpretation of the Soma ritual. One has to read Sri Aurobindo on the Soma ritual to understand how absolutely wrong the authors go in understanding the Soma ritual. The ritual’s metaphysics and symbolism are clearly beyond their comprehension.
Next, the introduction categorises the gods into three types (real or belief of the Vedic Rishis?): gods of the earth, gods of the midspace, and gods of heaven.Indra apparently stands apart from all the other gods. The archetypal parents are Heaven and Earth (mother); the progeny are the gods, especially the Sun. Their fantastic interpretation and subtle undermining of the Veda’s importance is evident when they write, “A less beneficent aspect of Heaven’s fatherhood is found in a myth, obliquely but vividly referred to a few times in the Rgveda and told more clearly in Vedic prose (though with Prajapati substituting for Heaven)—namely his rape of his own daughter.”
The authors describe danastuti as frequently brimming with puns, often obscene, and obscure terms. Apparently, the “most significant and salient feature of the poets’ relationship to language is their deliberate pursuit of obscurity and complexity.” Why do they do that? They explain, “On the conceptual level, it has to do with the audience—or the most important members of the audience—as well as the target of the composition, namely the gods. The aim of the poets is to praise the gods at the sacrifice. But it can’t be just any praise, tired repetitions of already hackneyed formulae—for the gods are connoisseurs.” The poets apparently prize the “obscurity” characteristic of the hymns because they are working to create something new while keeping the old traditions intact.
This is a snapshot of the scholarship evident in the most authoritative translation of the Rigveda in English. This book will undoubtedly distress any traditionally bound Indian or anyone with even a modicum of respect for the Rigveda. Next, we will see how contemporary scholars like Karen Thomson and Dr. SN Balagangadhara raise objections to this book.
Karen Thomson
Karen Thomson (Speak for itself: How a long history of guesswork and commentary on a unique corpus of poetry has rendered it incomprehensible, 2016) is scathing in her review of Jamison and Brereton’s Rigveda book. She begins by saying:
Within its soberly academic trio of hardback volumes, however, seethes an incoherent mix of mumbo-jumbo and misplaced obscenity, most of it apparently meaningless. It reads like a burlesque version, in the style of Hamlet Travestie, of a long lost original – except that the original is not lost on the contrary, it has been immaculately preserved.
Thomson describes how the Vedas reached the West in 1733 via a traveler, and there have been numerous attempts to translate the Vedas since then using the Sanskrit of 500 BCE, including, of course, Max Müller. Without the help of commentaries, as one French Orientalist Burnouf had insisted, the output in the form of translations was depressing for the scholars, as they hardly made sense. One publisher dismissed these attempts as “misapprehensions and deliberate perversions of their text, their ready invention of tasteless and absurd legends to explain the allusions, real or fancied, which it contains, their often atrocious etymologies.” Thomson talks about one author’s description of the fundamental importance of the division between priests and warriors, brahmin and kshatriya, in “Vedic civilization.” Thomson, however, says that this has no place in the ancient Rigveda poems, where kshatriya is an epithet of gods.
She mentions that a ray of hope emerged from the figure of Sri Aurobindo in distant Pondicherry when European scholars were “caught in the web like flies.” Sri Aurobindo had described the European scholarly attempts at translation as “grotesque nonsense.” Thomson provides numerous examples from the Jamison book to demonstrate how Sri Aurobindo’s criticisms remain relevant to most Western scholars working on the Vedas till date. However, a limited-circulation journal published Sri Aurobindo’s articles, and the Second World War left his work largely unknown and unreceived by most western libraries.
The prose texts called Brahmanas are important to understand the Vedic rituals, says Thomson. However, Western scholars did not give them much importance until Karl Hoffmann, a Vedic scholar, finally gave respect to the long-despised authors of the prose texts. This was a grave mistake on the part of Western scholars.
Thomson describes a conference where Stephanie Jamison discusses the need for a “magic decoder ring” in Vedic translations, which is achieved by placing square brackets after the Vedic words. Among the two thousand Vedic words, some examples of “decoding rings” include “weapons [=soma drinks]”, “offspring [=soma drinks]”, “dawns anoint their beam [=sacrificial post]”, and “gods lay down good wood in the belly [=the hearth(s) of the ritual fires].” This, Thomson says, is at odds with the statement in their introduction, “By translating the text literally, we hope to leave the interpretive opportunities open for the readers.”
Thomson continues, stating that once the requirement for making sense is removed, a vogue la galère (keep on, come what may: away we go) atmosphere pervades the entire book. For instance, Thomson notes that Jamison and Brereton frequently use the word “thrusting” to translate at least six unrelated verbs. Similarly, she writes that although the “precise sense of the complex word dhấman, “foundation, law, precept,” related to Greek thémis and to Old English dóm, is debated, it surely never means “buttocks.” Though the authors claim that they accept the traditional text without falling into the tendency of previous scholars, Thomson says that they, in fact, silently incorporate a large proportion of the emendations of earlier scholars. She provides many examples for these. She writes that this process of editing text based on assumed meaning has been ongoing since medieval times.
Another glaring contradiction that Thomson mentions is the firm statement in the introduction that “the Rigveda does not attest rice cultivation.” However, their text regularly incorporates the god Indra’s supposed theft of something they translate as “rice porridge.” Similarly, elsewhere, Indologist Michael Witzel and Jamison claim that the word armaká, translated as “mudflat” and implying “ruins,” is evidence that its composition postdates the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilisation. This suggests evidence for an Aryan invasion scenario, a theory that Indologists are eager to validate. Archaeological circles often cite this interpretation as well. Surprisingly, the word only occurs in one verse of the 10,000 or so in the Rigveda—a hapax legomenon! Similar is the desperate search for evidence of “spoked wheels” in the remains of the Indus Valley civilisation, making translations irresponsible.
She makes a significant statement in the final paragraph:
I have argued the sophistication and decipherability of this ancient anthology elsewhere. The approach that is required is straightforward. First, we need to begin with a different assumption: that the poems are as meaningful as their complex grammar, consistent language and word formation, and highly sophisticated metre would suggest. All later emendations should be set aside. But the most important thing is that this still undeciphered body of ancient poetry needs to be studied independently of “the clog.”
Thomson acknowledges that modern scholars owe a huge debt of gratitude to the ancient Indian tradition, which has preserved the text of these poems so faithfully. However, this tradition has presented both advantages and disadvantages. We must firmly put away prehistoric guesses about the Rigveda’s subject matter and meaning if we are to allow it to take its place in world literature. Until then, she says, the absence of scholarly engagement with its decipherment continues to present a block to our knowledge of early Indo-European history.
Dr. SN Balagangadhara On Jamison And Brereton
In his book Cultures Differ Differently (2022), Dr. SN Balagangadhara (Balu) deconstructs Jamison and Brereton’s Rig Veda book. In an illuminating chapter, The Vedic Society and a Brain Stasis, Balu dissects the introduction of the authors, whose book is considered to be the most recent and authoritative English translation of the Rigveda. The introduction perhaps summarises the state of Vedic studies today. According to Jamison and Brereton, Rigveda is supposedly the product of a small group of people called priests. Balu demonstrates that the text offers no evidence for either the priest-laity duo or the priests themselves. However, the existence of the Vedic rituals is the only evidence of the “religion” and its “priests.”
Scholars repeatedly affirm that, apart from rituals, one can learn nothing about social or political organisation from the Rigvedic texts. However, Indologists piece together disjointed remarks (incidental similes, asides, and few direct references) to extract historical and cultural information about society. This philological method based on oral and written texts makes “educated guesses” about the society and culture that produced them. Balu writes that the incoherence of these guesses becomes sharper if we believe the translators who fix the “Vedic period” dates between 1750 BCE and 400 BCE—a period of 1300 years. Balu says sharply that no amount of creative interpretation from disjointed fragments will provide us with any information about the political, social, and religious developments of a 1300-year period over a region bigger than Europe from 4000 years ago.
Jamison and Brereton define the Vedic people, or “Aryas,” as those “who sacrifice to the gods, who adhere to Vedic customs, who speak Indo-Aryan languages, and who in other ways identify themselves with Vedic culture.” Balu says that this is an empty statement. Who are the gods? What are the Vedic customs and sacrifices? How does one adhere to a Vedic culture? Jamison and Brereton interpret “manu” as a single individual and “manusa” as a tribe that belongs to “manu”, despite the fact that “manu” can also refer to “man” in general, and “manusa” could potentially refer to human beings rather than only “the tribe belonging to Manu.” The Indologists are keen to see people banding together as migratory tribes bound by lineage, kinship, language, religion, culture, etc. Therefore, in their interpretations, there is a necessity for a shared ancestor and common descent.
Who composed the Rigveda? The invading Aryans from Central Asia. The infamous Indo-Aryan debate has persisted for 200 years without a resolution. Balu asserts that Europeans seem to have a weakness when it comes to migration stories, a weakness they have also attributed to other groups, such as the barbarians. European scholarship by the nineteenth century fixed the image of concrete groups bound by race, kin, blood, language, and culture.
Indologists think that the fundamental unit of the Vedic society was a ‘tribe’. It appears that five major tribes primarily organised the Vedic people. Balu shows how speculation thrives in these statements concerning clans, kings, tribes, and federations with absolutely no evidence in the text. Thus, one is interpreting words from an allegedly “religious” text as though they are evidence of sociological facts and organisational charters.
According to Indologists, one of the tribes established a religious, political, and socially centralised authority by combining a set of hymns. Thus, an “emperor” (or a ‘king’, ‘chieftain’, ‘lesser king’, a ‘clan lord’) established the Vedic religion as a state religion; simultaneously, the priest also established it as a religion that controlled the masses, given the absence of a state in Ancient India. What would a political scientist make of this wisdom? After investigating different peoples across centuries, anthropologists have moved away from the notion of tribal society. If neither anthropologists nor sociologists have been able to develop a coherent understanding of tribal societies with their copious data, how plausible is it that Indologists are right regarding a society 4000 years ago by uncontrolled speculations on fragmentary texts?
Jamison and Brereton say the Rigvedic text is about the ability of mortals to causally affect both the divine realm and the cosmos through words (fulsome and elegant praise) and “sacrifice.” The Indologists also claim that the hymns’ aim is to persuade, induce, and constrain the gods to mobilise their powers to benefit the worshippers. In such simplistic ways, scholars rely on the success of hymns and rituals to explain the spread of Hinduism in India.
They now propose their own concept of “homology.” Jamison and Brereton assert that a web of equivalences in the ritual, cosmic, and everyday realms structure the Vedic mental universe. These homologies allow the priest to know the hidden connections between apparently disparate elements and give some power to control the cosmic by manipulation of the ritual. Therefore, Balu says, this Vedic text is not just a sociological text, but it possesses a level of power that surpasses even the most influential books in the sciences. If this is what Indian texts accomplish, and these ‘translations’ bring them to life, Balu poses a question: have Indians merely been the greatest mental retards of modernity, or have they truly enjoyed this singular honour throughout human history?
…Continued in Part 3
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