The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c8.12

v1.c8.12

Within the groups it is often possible to prove introduction of later material by the violation of the rules of order adopted by the compilers of the collection,¹ but differences of age among the groups themselves and between individual hymns, which are not marked out as foreign to the groups in which they are found, cannot yet be established. The most elaborate attempt made of late to find strata in the Rigveda is that of Prof. Arnold,² who by the test of metre divides the collection into five layers which cut sharply across the traditional grouping; but his criteria are clearly unsound,³ and depend on a purely hypothetical reconstruction of the metrical history of the hymns, to which objection can be taken on many grounds. Moreover, the results thus attained render any intelligible account of the development of Vedic religion impossible: the hymns to Dawn are certainly the most beautiful and least sacerdotal of all those of the Rigveda, and, for this reason and because in the later cult Dawn has but a small place, it is natural to assign them to the earliest period of Indian hymnology. The same conclusion is also indicated by the fact that this view alone harmonizes with the probable movements of the Vedic Indians. There can be little doubt that the bulk of the hymns cannot have been produced, as was formerly thought, in the Punjab, where the phenomena of the rains are poor and uninteresting and could not have given rise to the remarkable stress laid on these natural features by the Vedic poets in their conceptions of Indra and the Maruts. We must seek for the main home of the Vedic Indian in the country afterwards famous as Kurukṣetra, between the rivers Sarasvatī, now Sarsūti, and Dṛṣadvatī, probably the modern Chitang, and in the region of Ambāla, and the oldest hymns only, those to Dawn, can reasonably be supposed to have been composed while the invaders were still in the land of the five rivers.⁴ But Prof. Arnold is forced by his metrical tests to ascribe the importance of the Dawn and of the deities, sky and earth, which, like the Dawn, seem among the oldest, to a secondary state of the Vedic religion, when Dawn and sky and earth were not revered for themselves, but because of their connexion with the fire ritual, dawn being the time of sacrifice and the fire serving as a pillar to join heaven and earth, but yet to keep them asunder, while in the earliest period he sets Indra, the warrior god.