An Incredibly Blatant Mistranslation in Jamison's translations of the Rigveda

 

An Incredibly Blatant Mistranslation in Jamison's translations of the Rigveda

Shrikant G,. Talageri

 

The English translation of the Rigveda by Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, "The Rigveda - The Earliest Religious Poetry of India" (Univ. of Texas South Asia Institute, and Oxford University Press, 2017) is now regularly put forward as the most standard, in fact the latest and most deeply researched, translation of the Rigveda into the English language.

As I have been studying the Rigveda, based on earlier translations and studies, but even more pertinently on the basis of the primary sources (the text itself and various Rigvedic grammar texts and Word Concordances, etc.) since more than twenty years now, it was never necessary for me to examine this new translation in great depth, and indeed I always generally assumed that it could be that her translations were more accurate in many ways than earlier ones since she had the benefit of studying those before she undertook her own work, although I have always found the contemptuously critical attitude that not only Indian opponents of the AIT but even AIT warriors like Witzel have towards earlier translations (such as that of Griffith) to be totally subjective, unreasonable and pompous "armchair" criticism.

The only thing I had noticed, from the incidental examination of her translations, was that she, like some other western academicians who write on Indian texts, seemed to love to indulge in dirty talk (like small children who feel thrilled when they use "dirty words"), and many of her translations of verses are not just outright vulgar in meaning but even the terms used indicate a rather deliberately selected sleazy street lingo style. However, this would be a rather subjective assessment of her writing, and perhaps particularly notable only because it stands in sharp contrast to the translations of earlier "Victorian" translators like Griffith who chose not to translate certain erotic hymns and verses into English in the main body of his work, but gave the Latin translations (meant only for the scholars and not for the pedestrian readers)in an appendix. But I still assumed that her work must in general (though of course strictly within the blinkers-restricted AIT paradigm) be sincere otherwise.

Which is why I got a shock today when a reader on the subject brought to my notice the fact that her book contains certain deliberate and motivated mistranslations calculated to misdirect and sabotage genuine historical inquiry into Rigvedic history. Apparently, her translations contain references to "spoked wheels" where no such references exist in the text.

 

To go straight to the point, the Rigveda refers to ara, "spokes" in the following verses:

I. 32.15; 141.9; 164.11-13

V. 13.6; 58.5.

VIII. 20.14; 77.3.

X. 78.4.

There is no reference to "spokes" anywhere else in the Rigveda. These references clearly indicate that spoked wheels (which were invented and used in the manufacture of spoked wheels at some point of time in the second half of the third millennium BCE, i.e. 2500-2200 BCE) were totally unknown to the Old Rigveda (Books 2-4, 6-7), and only became known during the period of composition of the New Rigveda (Books 1, 5, 8-10). This shows that the composition of the Old Rigveda goes back beyond the invention of spokes. Of course, one single word cannot prove anything, but my investigation into New Words started in the year 2001 following an internet debate on spoked wheels (between Witzel and Farmer on one side, and a group of NRIs on the other), it further led on to my analysis of the Mitanni name types and later the common Rigvedic-Avestan name types and words, and to my book "The Rigveda and the Avesta - The Final Evidence" (2008), followed by my article "the Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda" (August 2020) and will now lead to my forthcoming article "The New Words and Other New Elements in the Rigveda". The combined effect of all this massive data shows that the Old Rigveda goes back beyond 2500 BCE, and it was composed in the region to the east of the Sarasvati river in modern Haryana.

The evidence that I have given (both textual and linguistic) has left the AIT academic lobby completely flabbergasted, and the only way it knows how to counter all the evidence is to completely stonewall it and to continue to write academic paper after academic paper in "peer-reviewed" journal after "peer-reviewed" journal simply reiterating what they have been writing before.

 

But there is a further "academic" development. It has now become necessary for them to start academic disinformation on a massive scale on crucial issues in order to try and sabotage the search for the Truth, by executing sharp u-turns to try to salvage the AIT. Thus, while the western academia has been claiming for over 200 years that the Rigvedic Sarasvati is identical with the Ghaggar-Hakra river-complex of Haryana: now suddenly all of western academia is on a campaign to stoutly reject this identification! A western academic scholar Johanna Nichols, who had written a deep linguistic study showing that the locus of the spread of Indo-European languages was from Bactria-Margiana to the west, has now been made to (reluctantly) recant from that position by way of a Stalin-era-style written confession accepting that she was wrong. Then a western scholar, W. E. Clark, in an academic paper, has tried to show that the Mitanni rulers had no Indo-Aryan connections at all.

Now here, Jamison has taken up the gauntlet to show that spoked wheels are not found mentioned only in the New Books, but are found mentioned all over the Rigveda!

 

In her book, Jamison correctly translates all the above references to ara as "spokes". But, wonder of wonders, she discovers that the Rigveda has plentful references not only to the above "spokes" but actually to "spoked wheels" themselves!!

The following are the verses in the Rigveda identified by Jamison as referring to "spoked wheels":

I.59.2;  128.6,8.

II.2.2,3;  4.2.

III.17.4.

IV.1.1;  2.1.

V.2.1.

VI.3.5; 7.1;  12.3;  15.4;  49.2.

VII.5.1;  10.3;  16.1.

VIII.19.1,21.

X.3.1,2,6,7;  61.20.

Now there has to be a word for her to translate as "spoked wheels". The word she chooses, above, is arati. [For some unknown reason, in five other references to arati,  I.58.7;  IV.38.4;  VI.67.8;  X.45.7;  46.4,  she makes no reference to spokes].

Now does this word mean "spoked wheels"? Note what two prominent western Sanskrit-English dictionaries have to say:

Monier Williams: "'moving quickly'; a servant, assistant, manager, administrator".

Cappeller: "1. assistant, minister, disposer. 2. discomfort, uneasiness".

 

Let us see how the other eminent western academic translators of the Rigveda have translated this word. For that we will take the first half of one of the above verses, I.59.2: mūrdhā divo nābhir agnih pṛthivyā athābhavad aratī rodasyoh.

Griffith: "The forehead of the sky, earth's center, Agni became the messenger of earth and heaven".

Wilson: "Agni the head of heaven, the navel of earth, became the ruler over both earth and heaven".

Grassmann: Des Himmels Haupt, der Erde Nabel, agni, ist beider Welten Diener er gewarden: "The head of heaven, the navel of earth, Agni has become the servant of both worlds".

Geldner: Das Haupt des Himmels, der Nabel der Erde ist Agni, und er war der Lenker beider Welten: "The head of heaven, the navel of the earth is Agni, and he was the ruler of both worlds".

 

Contrast this with Jamison's motivated mistranslation:

"The head of heaven the navel of the earth is Agni. And he bacame the spoked wheel of the two world-halves".

This one single, but very crucial, fraudulently mistranslated  word by Jamison exposes the abysmally low and political nature of "peer-reviewed" western academic scholarship, which is held in such high, blind and worshipful reverence by many Indian sepoys in Indian academia and on the internet.