GHost · His Enemies, Her Rivals: Gendered Expressions of Hostility in Ancient Indian Ritual Speech and Action, 1000 B.C.E.

His Enemies, Her Rivals: Gendered Expressions of Hostility in Ancient Indian Ritual Speech and Action, 1000 B.C.E.

How dangerous is speech? Around 1000 B.C.E. in Northern India, priests of the semi-nomadic Vedic peoples (or “Āryas” as they called themselves), trained in a sophisticated tradition of oral poetic composition, used their art not only to praise their gods and wealthy patrons but also to craft hymns full of hate in which they verbally attack their own rivals as well as their patrons’ enemies, often calling for nothing less than the death of the target. The hymns, composed in an archaic form of Sanskrit (Old Indo-Aryan, of the Indo-Iranian family of languages), were used in the liturgy of an ancient ritual tradition in which neither temples nor images had a place: the basic ritual act, performed at a carefully prepared but temporary site, was the offering of a substance into the fire along with hymn recitation. The only sources for the ancient form of this tradition are its texts, which have been codified in four ritual “sciences”—the four Vedas—and preserved through the millennia by complex memorization techniques as well as by manuscript transmission. The hymns calling for the death of an enemy are concentrated in the Atharva-Veda, often described as the Veda of “magic” in contrast to the mainstream “high” (śrauta) ritual of the other three Vedas: the R̥g-Veda of the oldest hymns, the Sāma-Veda of melodies, and the Yajur-Veda of sacrificial formulas. The Atharva-Veda is only slightly less ancient than the R̥g-Veda. The Kauśika-Sūtra (5th century B.C.E.), an ancient AV ritual manual, devotes an entire chapter to rites called ābhicārikāṇi; that is, rites of hostile ritual (abhicāra), meant to cause harm. Among the violent AV hymns we find not only those expressing hostility between males, but also those in which female speakers call for the destruction of female enemies. It has not been previously noticed that the Kauśika manual assigns only male-centred violent hymns to the hostile ritual (abhicāra) chapter, while the hymns expressing conflict between females are relegated to the chapter on “women’s rites” (strī-karmāṇi) (not “rights”!). This project examines this later categorical separation of female and male expressions of hostility in light of the actual expressions of hostility themselves, that is, the AV hymns used in the ritual: is there any difference in the way hostility and violence are expressed, on a linguistic level, between hymns in which a female beneficiary directs violence against a female target, and hymns in which a male beneficiary directs violence against a male target? Do the hymns prefigure or contradict the Kauśika manual’s later categorical separation of rites concerning male and female hostility? What new aspects of AV hostile ritual does this comparison bring to light? What does this tell us about the dynamics of societal gender structuring through the prism of language and ritual evolution? To answer these questions, the project focused on a corpus consisting of all hostile ritual hymns in the little studied 19th book of the AV’s Paippalāda hymn collection. This older collection of the Paippalāda branch was for a long time only known, and imperfectly so, from the existence of a corrupt Kashmirian manuscript (Open Access scan at the University of Tübingen library: urn:nbn:de:bsz:21-dt-32262). In the 1950s, Durgamohan Bhattacharyya discovered better manuscripts in the Indian state of Odisha, transmitted at the time alongside oral recitation within a living community of Paippalāda Brahmins. Images of the manuscripts are available from the SwissUBase (https://doi.org/10.48656/yyzd-bf48).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union