Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.70

c14.70

Among the Rigveda hymns there is one (IX, 112) which can hardly be other than a secular lyric - scarcely less out of place than the Song of Songs in the Hebrew religious collection - which has been made a little more appropriate by the insertion of a refrain, ‘Flow, Indu, flow for Indra’s sake’, after each couplet. Omitting these pious asides, we are left with an almost colloquial poem (it uses the Sanskrit equivalents for ‘Dad’ and ‘Mum’ rather than ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’, for instance), which gives a surprisingly natural and fresh picture of the Aryan scene in the Punjab of the middle of the second millennium B.C. (The syllabic metre is that of the original.)