A History of Sanskrit Literature c6.2

c6.2

IN the dim twilight preceding the dawn of Indian literature the historical imagination can perceive the forms of Aryan warriors, the first Western conquerors of Hindustan, issuing from those passes in the north-west through which the tide of invasion has in successive ages rolled to sweep over the plains of India. The earliest poetry of this invading race, whose language and culture ultimately overspread the whole continent, was composed while its tribes still occupied the territories on both sides of the Indus now known as Eastern Kabulistan and the Panjāb. That ancient poetry has come down to us in the form of a collection of hymns called the *Rigveda*. The cause which gathered the poems it contains into a single book was not practical, as in the case of the *Sāma-* and *Yajur-veda*, but scientific and historical. For its ancient editors were undoubtedly impelled by the motive of guarding this heritage of olden time from change and destruction. The number of hymns comprised in the *Rigveda*, in the only recension which has been preserved, that of the Çākala school, is 1017, or, if the eleven supplementary hymns (called *Vālakhilya*) which are inserted in the middle of the eighth book are added, 1028. These hymns are grouped in ten books, called *maṇḍalas*, or "cycles," which vary in length, except that the tenth contains the same number of hymns as the first. In bulk the hymns of the *Rigveda* equal, it has been calculated, the surviving poems of Homer.