The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c17.83

v1.c17.83

There is little in the Rigveda that bears on the life after death. The dead were either cremated or buried, and, if cremated, the ashes were regularly buried. This suggests that burial was the older method which was altered under the pressure of migration and perhaps the Indian climate. The Rigveda is innocent of widow burning, though it clearly has the conception which gave rise to that practice, the view that life in the next world is a reflex of this life, and though in the next period we have clear references to the fact that the burning of widows was not unknown. The direct authority for the custom, which later days sought to find in the Rigveda, owes its existence to a daring forgery of quite modern date¹. The exact fate of the dead is somewhat obscure: they are conceived, at one time, as dwelling in peace and converse with the gods of the world of Yama, the first of the dead and king of the dead. In other passages, the gods and the fathers are deemed to dwell in different places; while a third conception declares that the soul departs to the waters or the plants. Beyond this last idea there is nothing in the Rigvedic literature to suggest that the idea of metempsychosis had presented itself to the Indian mind: the fate of the evil after death is obscure: possibly unbelievers were consigned to an underground darkness; but so scanty is the evidence that Roth held that the Vedic poet believed in their annihilation. But this vagueness is characteristic of the comparative indifference of the Rigveda to morals: the gods are indeed extolled as true, though perhaps rather as a means of securing that they shall keep faith with their votary than as an assertion of ascertained truth. Except in the case of Varuṇa, the omniscient, whose spies watch men and who knows the every thought of man, the characteristics of the gods are might and strength rather than moral goodness, or even wisdom.