Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.20

c14.20

The writing down of the early Hindu religious literature was in fact achieved only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century at the instance of such British scholars as Sir William Jones, with what was regarded as the highly treasonable collaboration of certain Brahman priests. It is therefore clear that we cannot use the principles of textual criticism or of palaeography in studying this literature, since we have only a single standard text handed down in a single unvarying recension. Max Müller, after examining all the available texts of the Rigveda in the last century, concluded that ‘no use can be derived from them as manuscripts, because all of them are but transcripts, more or less carefully executed, of one and the same text’. But despite this extraordinary gap in time between the composition and the eventual writing down of these works, we can place great reliance on the purity of text. The exact preservation of every syllable and accent was thought to be of vital importance – the very sounds had a magical significance that could be varied only at the peril of the individual reciter. There is a story in a late religious work that stresses this danger, relating how the demon Tvaṣṭṛ recited a fatal magic spell against the god Indra, but, making a single slip in an accent, was himself killed by the spell recoiling against him.