for the ATOMIC hike of January 2015

"The elite tendencies of written traditions were exacerbated by the climate. The wet heat and the white ants destroyed any written text within a century or two, particularly since vellum was ruled out by the taboo against using animal substances and palm leaf was far more fragile than vellum. So these written texts by definition belonged to the privileged classes; the written texts that survived had to have been copied over and over again by a scribe patronized by someone with money to spare, and the scribe himself was invariably a male of high caste. Yet oral and written traditions interact throughout Indian history, with oral recitations of written texts and written records of texts recited by people who may or may not have been illiterate. This interaction, which we will note throughout the book, is exemplified by the relationship between writing and reciting in two of the defining texts of Hinduism, the Veda and the Mahabharata .- The Rig Veda was preserved orally, but it was frozen, every syllable preserved for centuries, through a process of rigorous memorization. There are no variant readings of the Rig Veda, no critical editions or textual apparatus. Just the Rig Veda. So much for the fluidity of orally transmitted texts. Correspondingly, the expected fixity of written texts dissolves when we look at the history of the reception and transmission of the Mahabharata, another enormous Sanskrit text, but one that was preserved both orally and in manuscript. In contrast with the Rig Veda, this text changed constantly; it is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundreds of Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions. So much for the fixity of written texts. The Rig Veda consists of 1,028 poems, often called mantras ("incantations"), grouped into ten "circles" ("mandalas"). (It is generally agreed that the first and last books are later additions, subsequent bookends around books 2-9.) The verses were rearranged for chanting as the Soma Veda ("Knowledge of Songs") and, with additional prose passages, for ritual use as the Yajur Veda ("Knowledge of Sacrifice"); together they are known as the three Vedas. A fourth, the Atharva Veda ("Knowledge of the Fire Priest"), devoted primarily to practical, worldly matters, and spells to deal with them, was composed later, sharing some poems with the latest parts of the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Indians had used writing for centuries, for everyday things like laundry lists and love letters and gambling IOUs.- But they refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing.- All Vedic rituals were accompanied by chants from the Sama Veda, which the priests memorized. The Mahabharata (13.24.70) groups people who read and recite the Veda from a written text (rather than memorize it and keep it only in their heads) with corrupters and sellers of the Veda as people heading for hell. A Vedic text states that "a pupil should not recite the Veda after he has eaten meat, seen blood or a dead body, had sexual intercourse, or engaged in writing."- It was a powerful text, whose power must not fall into the wrong hands. Unbelievers and infidels, as well as Pariahs and women, were forbidden to learn the Vedas, because they might defile or injure the power of the words,- pollute it like milk kept in a bag made of dogskin. The oral text of the Rig Veda was therefore memorized in such a way that no physical traces of it could be found, much as a coded espionage message would be memorized and then destroyed (eaten, perhaps - orally destroyed) before it could fall into the hands of the enemy. Its exclusively oral preservation ensured that the Rig Veda could not be misused even in the right hands: you couldn't take the Rig Veda down off the shelf in a library, for you had to read it in the company of a wise teacher or guru, who would make sure that you understood its application in your life. Thus the Veda was usually passed down from father to son, and the lineages of the schools or "branches" (shakhas) that passed down commentaries "from one to another" (param-para) were often also family lineages, patriarchal lineages (gotras). Those who taught and learned the Rig Veda were therefore invariably male Brahmins in this early period, though later other classes too may have supplied teachers, and from the start those who composed the poems may well have been more miscellaneous, even perhaps including some women, to whom some poems are attributed. The oral nature of the Rig Veda (and of the other Vedas too) was expressed in its name; it was called shruti ("what is heard"), both because it was originally "heard" (shruta) by the human seers to whom the gods dictated it but also because it continued to be transmitted not by being read or seen but by being heard by the worshipers when the priests chanted it.- The oral metaphor is not the only one - ancient sages also "saw" the Vedic verses - but it does reflect the dominant mode of transmission, orality. It made no more sense to "read" the Veda than it would simply to read the score of a Brahms symphony and never hear it. Now, one might suppose that a text preserved orally in this way would be subject to steadily encroaching inaccuracy and unreliability, that the message would become increasingly garbled like the message in a game of telephone, but one would be wrong. For the very same sacredness that made it necessary to preserve the Rig Veda orally rather than in writing also demanded that it be preserved with meticulous accuracy. People regarded the Rig Veda as a revealed text, and one does not play fast and loose with revelation. It was memorized in a number of mutually reinforcing ways, including matching physical movements (such as nodding the head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group, which does much to obviate individual slippage. According to the myth preserved in the tradition of European Indology, when Friedrich Max Miiller finally edited and published the Rig Veda at the end of the nineteenth century, he asked a Brahmin in Calcutta to recite it for him in Sanskrit, and a Brahmin in Madras, and a Brahmin in Bombay (each spoke a different vernacular language), and each of them said every syllable of the entire text exactly as the other two said it. In fact this academic myth flies in the face of all the available evidence; Miiller produced his edition from manuscripts, not from oral recitation. (It is of these manuscripts that Miiller remarks, "The MSS. of the Rig-veda have generally been written and corrected by the Brahmans with so much care that there are no various readings in the proper sense of the word."-) Yet like many myths, it does reflect a truth: People preserved the Rig Veda intact orally long before they preserved it intact in manuscript, but eventually it was consigned to writing (as were the originally oral poems the Mahabharata and the Ramayana). "