A History of Indian Literature v1.c8.s13.28

v1.c8.s13.28

Now it could be said, and it has been said by Oldenberg, that seven hundred years are a good span of time, in which much can happen. "One should consider," says Oldenberg,² "what 400 years have meant for the enormous plains of Northern and Southern America." This, however, is a poor comparison. The races and civilizations which came into contact with one another in America were, after all, very different from those with which we have to deal in ancient India. As far as the political conditions of ancient India are concerned, we learn from some of the songs of the Ṛgveda and from the epics that, just as is shown by the later history of India, continuous fighting took place between the separate Aryan tribes in ancient and even the most ancient times. Under such circumstances the conquest of India could only proceed step by step, extremely slowly. Actually we see also, if we compare the two oldest strata of Indian literature with each other, that the advance of the Aryans towards the east and south proceeded only very slowly. In the hymns of the Ṛgveda we find the Indo-Aryan people still established exclusively in the extreme north-west of India, and in Eastern Afghanistan, and yet the period in which the hymns of the Ṛgveda originated, must have stretched over centuries. That is proved by the many different strata of earlier and later parts, which we find in these hymns; it is proved, too, by the circumstance that the Ṛṣis, who not only in the Anukramaṇīs, but already in the Brāhmaṇas, were *erroneously* called "seers" or composers of the hymns, are in the hymns themselves regarded as seers of a remote antiquity.¹ The composers of the hymns, too, very often speak of "*old* songs," of "songs composed after the *old* manner," as though this poetry had been practised since time immemorial.² M. Bloomfield³ has shown that, of the approximately 40,000 lines of the Ṛgveda, nearly as many as 5,000 lines are repetitions. This proves that, at the time when the Ṛgveda was composed, the more modern poets would frequently borrow lines and expressions from older ones, and that there was actually in existence a large number of floating lines of verse, which any singer could incorporate in his song if he so fancied. But we have repeatedly seen how far, after all, the Ṛgveda lies behind all other literary works of the Veda. Even the language of the hymns is much more archaic than that of the Vedic prose works. The religious views and the conditions of civilization are quite different. The Brāhmaṇas, Āraṇyakas and Upaniṣads pre-suppose not only the hymns of the Ṛgveda, but also the spells and prayers of the other Saṃhitās as sacred texts of hoary age. Indeed, these old hymns and spells were often no longer understood. The old legends had fallen into oblivion. I will recall only the distance separating the Śunaḥśepa legend of the Aitareya-Brāhmaṇa from the hymns of the Ṛgveda.[^1)