Parjanya and Indra
A comment by a reader (named Harsh Tomar) asked a question concerning the “two Rain-Gods” of the Rigveda, Indra and Parjanya. I have already written about it in my article “The Elephant and the Proto-Indo-European Homeland”, showing that Indra is the original Rain(-and-Thunder) God throughout the Rigveda, and that Parjanya is a new God who appears only in the New Rigveda.
I am writing an article specially restricted to this topic because:
1. What I wrote earlier is inside an article dealing with another topic (the Elephant) and therefore will be missed by most readers, so an article restricted to this issue, and making it clear in the title, was necessary.
2. Even more important, while replying to the comment, I found a new piece of evidence proving the lateness or newness of Parjanya in the Rigveda, which clinches what I wrote earlier.
In my earlier article on the Elephant, I had written the following:
But
there is another reconstructed word (*pherkhou-)
meaning "oak/oak forest/forest/mountain forest" (but never "wood"):
the word means "oak" in Italic, Celtic and Indo-Aryan (Skt. parkaṭī-,
actually a name of the white fig tree, but Punjabi pargāi refers to the
holly oak, quercus ilex), and the word has a transferred meaning to
"fir/pine/tree/forest" in Germanic: the Germanic, e.g. English, word
for "forest" is itself derived from this word. The reconstructed PIE
word is derived from the root *pheru-
"cliff/mountain/rock" (found in Sanskrit and Hittite) from which we
also get the Sanskrit parvata- "mountain". The name of a
common PIE thunder-god is derived from the same two words (with a suffix,
as *pherkhou/n- and *pheru/n-):
Indo-Aryan (Vedic) Parjanya, Baltic Perkūnas, Slavic Perun,
Germanic Fjǫrgyn (mother of the thunder-god Thor). As Gamkrelidze points
out: "The connection between the Proto-Indo-European thunder-god *pher(kho)u-n-
and terms for 'mountain oak, 'oak forest on mountain-top', 'mountain', 'cliff',
*pher(kho)u-, can be explained if we assume the ancient
mythological pattern of lightning striking great oaks on mountain-tops. This
view must reflect some recurrent feature of the mountainous region inhabited by
the ancient Indo-European tribes" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:528).
So
does all this prove that the Rigveda contains "linguistic memories"
of "the mountainous region inhabited by the ancient Indo-European
tribes" in Afghanistan and Central Asia, or much further beyond? On
the contrary:
1.
The oak, by any name, is totally missing in the Rigveda and in fact in any
Vedic text. The word parkaṭī-, when it does appear in much later
Classical Sanskrit texts, means the Indian white fig tree, ficus infectora,
already mentioned in the Atharvaveda with the name plakṣa-. The name is
however found in Punjab in much later times as pargāī, one of the many
names of a species of oak tree, the holly oak (quercus ilex), a tree
native to the Mediterranean, and therefore clearly a name imported at a very
late date from the west.
2.
There are clearly two "thunder-gods" in the Rigveda: Indra and
Parjanya. The name Indra has its origin in the word indu-
"drop", and therefore he is a thunder-god associated with the actual
rain-drops, and (apart from the fact that he is basically restricted to the
Indo-Aryan branch) is clearly a god of the monsoon region of Haryana and its
interior areas. The name Parjanya (apart from the fact that it has
equivalents in three other European branches) has its origins, as we saw, in
the oak-forests of the north-western mountains.
Indologists
and AIT scholars, with their inverted logic, classify Parjanya as the original
PIE and therefore also Vedic thunder-god because he is found in Slavic,
Baltic and Germanic mythology as well, and Indra as a "new"
thunder-god who increasingly replaced the original PIE thunder-god in India.
The facts, however, indicate the opposite picture:
a)
Indra is the most important deity in the Rigveda, and has over 250 hymns
addressed to him or glorifying him (out of a total of 1028 hymns in the
Rigveda). Parjanya has only 3 hymns addressed to him or glorifying him.
Even more significantly, while Indra is present in every part of the text,
old and new, and is mentioned (by this name alone, not counting his
other numerous special epithets) 2415 times in 538 hymns, Parjanya
is mentioned only 36 times in the following 25 hymns:
Old
Books (6,3,7,4,2):
IV.57.8.
VI.49.6;
50.12; 52,6,16; 75.15.
VII.35.10;
101.5; 102.1,2; 103.1.
New
Books (5,1,8,9,10):
V.53.6;
63.4,6; 83.1-5,9.
I.38.9,14;
164.51.
VIII.6.1;
21.8; 102.5.
IX.2.9;
22.2; 82.3; 113.3.
X.65.9;
66.6,10; 98.1,8; 169.2.
It
will be seen that all the references except one (VII.35.10)
are in New Books or in Redacted Hymns (underlined), and include the
notoriously late hymns towards the end of Books 4,6 and 7 (there being no
reference to Parjanya at all in Books 2 and 3). The sole exception (VII.35.10)
is clearly just a case of a late added name in a long list of deities in a
Viśvedeva ("all-gods") hymn.
This
proves that Parjanya is a deity of the northwest who entered the Rigveda in the
period of the New Books, as the Vedic Indo-Aryans expanded northwestwards into
the mountainous areas from the monsoon area in Haryana and east. As the deity
is found only in Slavic, Baltic and Germanic, it also confirms the presence of
(at least the remnants of) the ancestral Slavic, Baltic and Germanic dialects
in Central Asia during the period of the New Books of the Rigveda.
b)
Further, while Indra is otherwise found only in Indo-Aryan (and, by
opposition, as a demon in the rival Iranian tradition recorded in the Avesta),
he is also represented in Hittite mythology in the name of the goddess Inara
who helps the (unnamed) rain god to kill the Great Serpent who was interfering
with the rainfall. Hittite (Anatolian) was linguistically the first IE branch
to separate from the other branches in any hypothetical Homeland; and the
presence of Inara in Hittite mythology confirms either the greater
antiquity of Indra (to Parjanya), or the presence of the
proto-Hittites in Central Asia at the time of the north-westward expansion of
the Vedic Aryans, or both.
As I pointed out, the word Parjanya is found only a few times and only in the New Rigveda and Redacted Hymns, except for one reference in VII.35.10. Since it is impossible that an old God could be found only in the New Rigveda and Redacted Hymns, except for one single reference (while Indra is found 2415 times in 538 hymns spread through every stratum of the Rigveda), it is logical to conclude that that one single reference, the exception, is because the verse (VII.35.10) is an interpolation or late addition into a hymn which provides a list of different Gods, obviously added at a late date to include in that list a new God.
But now, on examining the verse again, I find another and clinching piece of conclusive evidence showing that verse to be a late addition into the hymn: the particular line also refers to a second God, kṣetrasya pati (“Lord of the Dwelling Place”).
Exactly like Parjanya, the God kṣetrasya pati also, outside this one single reference (VII.35.10), is found only in the New Rigveda and Redacted Hymns:
IV.57.1,2,3.
VII.35.10.
X.66.13.
[As a “fun fact”, the word kṣetrasya itself, outside these three hymns, is found only in the New Rigveda:
I.112.22.
It may be noted that in the Oldest Book 6, the word kṣetra itself is found only in two Redacted hymns, and is completely missing in Book 2.]
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