Hymn: An Aural History

Shorn of the sarcasm, and stripped to its grammatical meaning, it is not strictly untrue. Just one thing. Frits Staal is Dutch, though it’s unclear if that lessens his crime for those whose preferred line of attack is ad hominem. Modern philologists who study the Vedic corpus are a secretive cabal: sages living in a forest of difficult words like ‘recension’ and ‘redaction’. (Not to speak of the Sanskrit which, as things stand, is enough to scare off about a billion Indians.) If Staal has emerged from the foliage with a book that is accessible to the interested layperson but won’t offend the more serious reader, we can be grateful. Why? Because of the kind of person/scholar he is.

Though a venerable elder of the tribe, Staal is not your average book-bound Vedicist, doing exegesis for a living. He has behind him half-a-century of observing and recording Vedic practice as a live ritual culture—doing fieldwork in the ’50s and ’60s the only way that’s worth telling your grandchildren, on a temperamental Royal Enfield. He has some faint infamy in Kerala, as ‘the white man’ at whose behest a full-fledged agnicayana ritual was held in 1975, an event that inaugurated a strain of Vedic revivalism which runs to this day. To counter any ambivalence in rationalist paradise about him, we can say Staal is not merely some special form of hippie. Coming to Sanskrit studies with a training in Continental mathematical logic, he was quick to see the conceptual genius of Panini and other early linguists—this is the armature on which his Vedic visualisations rest.

What’s a logician doing with mantra anyway? Well, with a humane rationalism that never descends into scorn or abracadabra, he submits it to a formal analysis (revealing the "syntax of ritual" to have recursive properties: like language and birdsong!). It’s a bit like what Levi-Strauss might have done with the Vedas—sans the ahistoricism, one might add, for Staal has a story to tell. And happily, for all his affinity to the exact sciences and "highly confirmed knowledge", he is not above acting on the inspired hunch, sketching impressionist landscapes and then joining the dots.

The scholarly mainstream in Indology has been shifting course like a Rigvedic river. It has to flow around new facts—Harappa in the ’20s, now its Oxus cousin, the BMAC, discovered in the ’70s. Even criticism has a formative role in its evolution. The ‘Aryan’ thesis, for one, stands refined to the point of evaporating: it now connotes linguistic diffusion, not ethnocide. In Staal’s book, there is no invasion, only a back-and-forth movement of "rites, goods, people, ideas" across a Eurasian totality. There’s no Harappan script either: it’s been interred along with the bones of the proto-donkey! Vedic-speaking males trickle in over the Bolan Pass, marry local women, later the Buddhists offer mirror inversions of their zigzag, trans-Pamir routes. Native Samavedis fit their older chants onto the new language on the block. The Avestan oeuvre of Persia, in a tongue closest to that of the Rigveda, exhibits strong sibling traits in structure. Geometry grows around the secrets of the altar.

Romila Thapar coaxed this book out of Staal. It’s not a polemic in tone, structure or intent; the narrative tiptoes gingerly through the supercharged theatre of modern debates. Unlike the pugnacious Michael Witzel, Staal pulls his punches. Wielding his forensic skills on a trail clouded over by many hooves, blending personal insight with a composite history pieced from eclectic sources, he paints a people in transition from the nomadic to the sedentary. A people with only one mnemonic mode for encoding experience: the intangible brick and mortar of the spoken word. Staal rescues mantra from our commonplace view of it as ossified ritual, treats it as a venue of meaning and memory. It is a book even critics on the right could read to enlarge their vocabulary before switching on their own rituals of refutation.