Is It Just an
“Assumption” that Book 10 of the Rigveda is the Latest Book?
Shrikant G. Talageri
There is a twitter handle named “Vedic Wisdom..ॐ @VedicWisdom1”, who, I believe, as the title suggests, tweets about Vedic literature or the wisdom found in that literature. He was brought to my notice because, in answer to a question about whether “varna was not there in Rigveda” because references to the varṇas are found only once in one hymn in the latest Book 10, he replies: “It’s wrong, 10th Maṇḍala of Rigveda is not a ‘Later Book’. It is just an assumption”. [
[Incidentally, after that he was also apparently asked, in the same thread, the following question: “Lol. Do you think Indians are literally zero in linguistics as Dr. Koenraad Elst and Shrikant Talageri suspect?” As he does not appear to have replied to this question, and, even more to the point, as I have never made such a ridiculous and sweeping assertion about “Indians” being “zero in linguistics”, I will not bother to go into that issue even if he replies to it].
Is it really just an “assumption” that Book 10 is a “Later Book’?
I do not have any detailed idea of exactly how great an authority this tweeter is in the matter of Vedic Wisdom (although I have seen a quote from the Manusmriti by this same tweeter earlier, in response to Rahul Gandhi’s claim that “In Manusmriti it is written that ‘rapists must be allowed to roam free, and rape victims should be punished”, by quoting a verse from the Manusmriti 8.364: “One who violates an unwilling girl deserves immediate death penalty”, so I assume he has a good knowledge of various texts and is able to locate relevant quotations from those texts),
But conclusions about the history and the chronology of the Rigveda or of any Rigvedic text are not part of any study of Vedic Wisdom but of the analysis of Vedic History and Chronology, which is a totally different field of study from the study of Wisdom and Philosophy. So from-the-pulpit declarations about the chronology of any text, or portion of any text, are not justified by however high a degree of knowledge anyone may have of Vedic wisdom.
I have shown, in my article “Final Version of the
Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda”, that quite
apart from the fundamental division into an Old Rigveda and a New
Rigveda, Book 10, although it belongs to the New Rigveda
along with Books 5,1,8 and 9, is definitely, in many ways later than the entire
earlier bulk of the rest of the Rigveda (Books 2-9, and almost the whole of Book
1 as well), the composition of Book 10 continued even after around 2000
BCE (when the earlier nine Books were almost frozen) till around 1500
BCE or so, when the entire text was frozen to more-or-less its present
status.
Thus, Book 5 is a New Book (along with Books 1,8,9,10), but it is older than the other four New Books to an extent that it is classifiable also as a Family Book along with the five Old Books (6,3,7,4,2) as distinct from the four non-Family Books (1,8,9,10),
Likewise, Book 10 is a New Book (along with Books
5,1,8,9), but it is later then all the other nine Books to an
extent that all the nine form one bloc distinct from Book 10.
For good measure, to show the above point (about the
chronological distinction between the Old Rigveda and the New
Rigveda) in the perspective of solid Rigvedic data, my above article
lists out in merciless detail a long list of new words
which occur in the various books as follows:
OLD BOOKS 6,3,7,4,2: (280 Hymns, 2368 verses)
Book 6: 0 new words, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
Book 3: 0 new words, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
Book 7: 0 new words, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
Book 4: 0 new words, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
Book 2: 0 new words, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
REDACTED HYMNS IN OLD BOOKS 6,3,7,4,2: (62 Hymns, 873 verses)
Book 6: 233 new words in 16/16 hymns and 160 verses, 0 new composer names, 2 new meters.
Book 3: 148 new words in 14/14 hymns and 100 verses, 1 new composer name, 0 new meters.
Book 7: 206 new words in 16/17 hymns and 121 verses, 0 new composer names, 3 new meters.
Book 4: 91 new words in 11/11 hymns and 66 verses, 0 new composer names, 0 new meters.
Book 2: 46 new words in 4/4 hymns and 23 verses. 0 new composer names, 1 new meter.
NEW BOOKS 1,5,8,9,10: (686 Hymns, 7311 verses)
Book 1: 1750 new words in 190/191 hymns and 1112 verses, 61 new composer names, 24 new meters.
Book 5: 685 new words in 87/87 hymns and 434 verses, 39 new composer names, 20 new meters.
Book 8: 1505 new words in 102/103 hymns and 928 verses, 50 new composer names, 26 new meters.
Book 9: 966 new words in 114/114 hymns and 658 verses, 61 new composer names, 7 new meters.
Book 10: 1922 new words in 191/191 hymns and 1124 verses, 89 new composer names, 19 new meters.
To return to the specific subject of Book 10, let me repeat
quotations from an earlier scholar, B.K.Ghosh, in the Bharatiya
Vidya Bhavan volume “History and Culture of the Indian people,
Vol.1, The Vedic Age”, 1951/1957, edited by R.C.Majumdar:
“On the whole, however, the language of the first nine
Maṇḍalas must be regarded as homogeneous [….] With the tenth Maṇḍala it
is a different story. The language here has definitely changed. The difference
in language between the earlier Maṇḍalas and tenth would have appeared in its
true proportions if the texts concerned had been written down at the time they
were composed and handed down to us in that written form.
The fact, however, is that the text tradition of the
Rigveda was stabilized at a comparatively late date, and fixed in writing at a
much later epoch. The result has been not unlike what would have happened if
the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare were put in writing and printed for the
first time in the twentieth century: in short, the text of the Rigveda as
handed down to us is, in various details, not only different from what it
actually was, but to some extent also screens the differences that mark off the
languages of the earlier Maṇḍalas from that of the tenth.” (pp.340-341).
“The language of the tenth Maṇḍala represents a distinctly later stage of the Rigvedic language. Hiatus, which is frequent in the earlier Rigveda, is already in process of elimination here. Stressed i u cannot in sandhi be changed into y v in the earlier parts, but in the tenth Maṇḍala they can. The ending –āsas in nominative plural is half as frequent as –ās in the Rigveda taken as a whole, but its number of occurrences is disproportionately small in the tenth Maṇḍala . Absolutives in –tvāya occur only here. The stem rai- is inflected in one way in the first nine Maṇḍalas, and in another in the tenth, and in the inflexion of dyau-, too, the distribution of strong and weak forms is much more regular in the earlier Maṇḍalas. The Prakritic verbal stem kuru- appears only in the tenth Maṇḍala for the earlier kṛiṇu-. Many words appear for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala or are shared by it only with the interpolated part of other Maṇḍalas. The old locative form pritsu, adjectives like girvaṇas and vicharṣani, and the substantive vīti do not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala , though in the earlier Maṇḍalas they are quite common. The particle sim, which is unknown in the Atharvaveda, occurs fifty times in the first nine Maṇḍalas but only once in the tenth. Words like ājya, kāla, lohita, vijaya, etc., occur for the first time in the tenth Maṇḍala, as also the root labh-. Words shared with the tenth Maṇḍala only by the interpolated parts of other Maṇḍalas, the Valakhilyas, and unmistakably late hymns, are loka (for earlier uloka which is a haplology for uruloka), mogha, visarga, gup- (a back-formation from gopa), etc. And words which occur mostly, though not exclusively, in the tenth Maṇḍala and these parts, are sarva, bhagavant, prāṇa, hridaya, etc. The archaic particle ī of pronominal origin, for which the Padapāṭha throughout wrongly reads īm, does not occur at all in the tenth Maṇḍala, and the particle īm, which is only less archaic than ī, occurs in it only about half a dozen times. Of forms like dakshi, adukshat , etc., which are. the results of the action of a pre-Vedic phonetic law, only one, namely dudukshan, occurs in the tenth Maṇḍala. It is unnecessary to dilate any further on the language of the Rigveda.” (pp.343-344).
In fact, while expounding another point, Ghosh points out: “This also proves in a striking manner that the language of the earlier Mandalas was already in danger of being misunderstood when the hymns of the tenth Mandala were being composed.” (p.340).
So yes: Book 10 is much later than the other nine Maṇḍalas, though it belongs to the fag end of a chronological period − the period of composition of the New Rigveda which included in its earliest part Book 5, and in its middle parts Books 1,8 and 9 − which stands out distinct from an earlier period, the period of composition of the Old Rigveda (Books 6,3,7,4,2).
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