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Whereas Hanuman is sometimes alleged to be primarily a “men's deity”, this chapter takes a fresh look at his cult through the lens of gender relations and of discourses about sexuality and its control. It re-examines the controversial Vrishakapi (“bull-monkey”) hymn in the Rig Veda as well as the emotional portrayal of Hanuman's encounter with Sita in the Sundarakanda of the Ramayana of Valmiki. It then turns to several modern temple cults in which an independent, virginal Mother Goddess is accompanied by a simian bodyguard and familiar, whose close relationship with her is celebrated in legends and folksongs. The final section of the chapter examines lore that questions or problematizes Hanuman's famed celibacy by making him (e.g., in the Rama stories of Jainism) either a lusty adventurer or (in much modern Hindi-language lore) the unwitting “husband” of a submarine wife and father to a mighty son.

This chapter discusses Hindu origins. The Indo‐Aryan controversy is examined: Did Hindu scriptures emerge as an indigenous product or did they arrive with migrating foreigners? The chapter discusses the religious thought of the Rig Veda with a special focus on the sacrifice and its intellectual foundations.

The various attempts made to date Sanskrit texts (the Veda) are examined in the context that if the Ŗgveda (the earliest of the texts) is at least a millennium older than its commonly accepted date, then the possibility of Dravidian and/or Munda and/or unknown linguistic influences on Vedic Sanskrit being the result of the speakers of these languages intruding on an Indo-Aryan-speaking area after the other languages had already left, as opposed to vice versa, becomes a much more serious consideration. Moreover, the relationship between Vedic and Proto-Indo-European would need to be reconsidered, and any proposal associating the overland trajectory of the Indo-Aryans with the Andronovo culture, a southern Iranian route, or any Post-Harappan culture in the subcontinent, loses value. For these and other reasons, a much older date for the Veda is foundational to the Indigenous Aryanist position; if by contrast, the oldest strata of the Ŗgveda cannot be far removed from the conventionally accepted date of 1200 or 1500 B.C.E., then the Indigenous Aryanist case loses cogency. The chapter examines the dating of Proto-Indo-European first, before going on to look at the dating of the Veda itself, paying special attention to astronomy and its bearing on Vedic chronology. The author concludes that none of the evidence presented so far in the book convincingly settles the debate, and that the only evidence that could do this with any degree of certainty would be the decipherment of the script from the Indus Valley civilization.

The period from approximately 200 bce to 300 ce is usually called a time of invasions, meaning those of the Greeks, Śakas, and Kushanas, or “between the empires.” However, the 500 years between the Mauryas and the Guptas were perhaps the most turbulent, but probably also the most productive and fertile of Indian history. It is usually not considered that this period was one of tremendous curiosity about and openness toward the outside world. Building on a Veda and on Mauryan integration, numerous new external influences were added, processed, assimilated, and transformed in a typical Indian way, so that with the Guptas a completely new India emerged, the so-called Classical India of historians. Some of the influences and reactions against them that were at work during the half millennium “between the empires” preceding the emergence of the great Gupta culture are investigated in this chapter.

Chapter 3 takes up the implications of dharma having never been a central concept in the pre‐Aśokan Vedic canon. It examines most of the Vedic canon's few prominent usages from the Ṛgveda through the mantra texts to the Upanisads in context. It first considers. the implications of dharma, in the form dhárman, having begun in the Ṛgveda as a new concept. It then pursues the use of this concept to generate novel enigmas there and elsewhere in the Vedic canon; its centrality to changing notions of kingship in these texts; and, no less important, to changing notions of the Brahmin in the consolidation of the varṇa or caste system.

The Bhāgavata Purāna, one of the most important textual monuments to Hindu devotional (bhakti) mysticism, claims as its source and goal ecstatic union with Lord Krsna. This paradigmatic devotional text, which originated in South India in the 9th or early 10th century, attempts to invest its mystical teachings with canonical authority by securing for itself a place within the brahmanical Hindu canon. The Bhāgavata establishes its canonical status through assimilating itself to two principal categories of brahmanical scripture: Purāna and Veda. This chapter attempts to elucidate the various strategies used by the Bhāgavata Purāna—in terms of its form, language, content, and self-representations—to establish its dual status as the “Purāna–Veda” that is the culminating scripture of the brahmanical canon.

The principal traits of Aryan culture are started by Vedic, Iranian, and Greek literary texts and cognate terms found in the proto-Indo-European languages. The texts that help to reconstruct the material and other aspects of Aryan culture comprise the Rig Veda, Zend-Avesta, and Iliad and Odyssey. These texts present agriculture and pastoralism as the principal sources of livelihood. The horse plays a crucial role in the life of the early Indo-Europeans. War chariot with spoked wheels also appear. The pit-dwelling may have developed in cold conditions. The use of birch-wood appears to be an Aryan feature along with underground houses. The fire altar is mentioned in the Rig Veda, and fire worship is very important in Avesta. Animal sacrifice was an important Aryan ritual. The cult of soma was confined to only the Iranian and Vedic peoples. The migration of the Indo-Aryans is finally described.

The Indo-Iranians came from two areas of Central Asia. The Aryans in India are known from the Rig Veda. This text is the earliest text of the Indo-European languages. The Indo-Aryans were engaged in fighting with the pre-Aryans and amongst themselves. The Rig Vedic people had a superior knowledge of agriculture and they were a predominantly pastoral people. The administrative machinery of the Aryans in the Rig Vedic period functioned with the tribal chief. The Rig Veda does not mention any officer for administration of justice. The practice of levirate and widow remarriage was also shown. It then displays some consciousness of the physical appearance of people in north-western India. The significant divinities addressed in the Rig Veda include Indra, Agni, Varuna, Soma, Maruts and Sarasvati. They have many deities who represent the different forces of nature in one form or another but are also assigned human activities.

Archaeology informs that people lived in small groups in the hilly areas in the Palaeolithic age. The Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities lived on the uplands in the proximity of hills and rivers. The Rig Vedic society was primarily pastoral. People were semi-nomadic, and their principal possessions were cattle and horses. Although artisans, peasants, priests, and warriors figure even in the earlier portions of the Rig Veda, society as a whole was tribal, pastoral, seminomadic, and egalitarian. Three processes coincided with one another in post-Vedic times. These were Aryanization, ironization, and urbanization. The varna system authorized the kshatriya to collect taxes from the peasants and tolls from traders and artisans. The social system worked well from the age of the Buddha to Gupta times. Then, it underwent a change due to internal upheavals.

This chapter concludes that the Vedic themes discussed in the book show a particular kind of transformation as one traces their viniyoga, or application in ritual commentary through metonymy. Each theme involves a “ritual disassociation,” whereby images and actions are harnessed to each other in metonymic association in the early Vedic period and then become de-linked as the Vedic period progresses. It traces the changes in metonymy, or interpretation of images of Rig Vedic mantras related to fire, mental power, enemy, journey, and creation through the Vedic period and in different Vedic texts, including Grhya Sutras, Śrauta Sutras, and Vidhana. This study shows the shift from metonymic power of the image (the associative linking of one ritual element to another) to productive power of the image (the use of the single ritual image to stand in for a number of potential outcomes) with time.

This chapter introduces the book which is focused on the study of the use of Rig Vedic mantras in particular ritual schools. The use of Vedic mantras in particular ritual situations and the method behind it is called viniyoga. Viniyoga is undertaken according to particular hermeneutic principles based on metonymy, or associative thought. In the analysis of viniyoga, the Vedic imagination has powerful associative and metonymic properties, linking mantric image to ritual action. By these linkages, the interpretive schools (śākhās) of the Rig Veda suggest possible associative worlds that might be utilized in the performance of sacrifice. Several common Vedic categories (eating, enemies, eloquence, journeys, the attainment of another world) are discussed and the interpretation of a single Vedic mantra, or set of mantras, throughout the various Rig Vedic ritual schools, or branches, of the Vedic period, mainly the Śrauta and Grhya, are interpreted in this study.

This chapter uses recent works on the theory of metonymy to show how metonymy might be viewed as a specific kind of intellectual practice that provides cognitive linkages between ritual image and the Vedic ritual act. It begins by focusing more specifically on the question of the mental image, bringing recent studies by Lee Siegel and Ariel Glucklich on the nature of religious imagery to bear on the mental operations that are involved in each new interpretive setting for each performed mantra. Performance theory, especially the work of Dennis Tedlock and Charles Briggs, helps to show the basic value of what it means to imagine something within a ritual situation, and how the relationship between the mental image and the ritual act is constituted. The basic properties of metonymy including framing, referential capacities, linguistic pragmatism, and its use of prototypes are described to develop a theory of metonymy, or association, to understand the use of Rig Vedic imagery in ritual.

This chapter reviews the ways in which viniyogas have created different kinds of associative worlds about eating in the Vedic literature. The food imagery of the Rig Veda becomes used in the Upanisads as representative of the emerging idea of a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. In both the Śrauta and Grhya worlds a new class of rites, called pākayajña, or “sacrifices of cooking,” emerge as ways of thinking about food. In the application of Rig Veda hymns 1.2 and 1.3, the communal process of consumption involving the full participation of the deities in the Śrauta world became a solitary eating. The next set of Rig Vedic hymns (10.1–5) links fire, eating, and the Sun. The hymn to the waters, Rig Veda 10.30, creates an elegant set of mutually referential metonymies. Rig Veda 10.88 is a hymn that celebrates both Soma and Agni. This hymn describes the Soma libation as undecaying and pleasant, offered to Agni, who touches the sky, and the gods supply Agni, the giver of happiness, with food.

This chapter discusses the conception of the enemy and its history in particular usages of Rig Vedic mantras 1.32, 1.50, 1.83–84, 6.73, and 6.2.11. The Vedic enemy concept is rich in metonymic usages in the ritual schools, instead of being simple “black magic.” In each case of imprecations against the enemy, something is selected out of the ritual context of the speech utterance (the mantra) and placed in contiguity (metonymy) with it. In Rig Vedic imagery, verses about the enemy are directed at foes that need to be defeated repeatedly. In the Śrauta literature these same verses are used in rituals that are exceptions to regular sacrificial performances. In the Grhya material, these mantras describe some aspect of brahminical victory and vulnerability. In the Vidhana material, mantra recitations transform any potentially harmful agent or situation (enemies, illness, and so on) as it comments on it. The change in interpretive strategy from earlier texts to the Rig Vidhana is one of generalization from sacrificial situations to ones that include any and all possible circumstances in which the verses might be relevant.

This chapter examines the history of images used for the attainment of mental power and verbal ability by describing metonymical interpretations of the Rig Veda mantras 1.18.6, 8.100.10–11, 8.101.11–16, 10.21.1, 10.71, and 10.125. In the Śrauta literature, these mantras tend to be used in the invitational verses just before an offering during sacrifice, usually an animal offering. In the Grhya literature, they are used before the arrival of a guest, before a meal, or when a Vedic student is returning home and encounters strange sounds. In the Vidhana literature, however, they are recited to secure a more general form of verbal eloquence, mental agility, peace, as well as averting any and all consequences in case one has uttered a falsehood.

This chapter analyzes the Vedic mantras associated with journeying through space, including Rig Veda 1.42, 1.99, 1.189, 3.33, 3.45, and 10.57. The Rig Vedic imagery describes the dangers of journey-taking in general and invokes particular gods who are agile at finding their way, such as Pūsan and Indra. These hymns frequently pray for wealth as well as safety on a journey, as the two are inextricably linked in the Vedic world. In the Śrauta literature, these mantras can be used as part of the “sacrificial extension” of recitals that links one day and the next in a multiday sattra, or session. In the Grhya material, the mantras are applied in the case of the samavartana ceremony, the ritual performed by a Vedic student who wishes to leave after completing studies. In the Vidhana material these mantras are used more generally, when setting out on any dangerous journey. They act as expiation for going astray or committing a wrongdoing, or for when one is setting out on a business journey in the anticipation of garnering wealth.

This chapter examines the interpretive history of Rig Vedic mantras for attaining heaven, including mantras 1.154.1–3, 9.112–15, 10.82.7, and 10.129 during the Vedic period. These hymns contain images of creating and making, whether it is the recapitulation of the deeds of Viśvákarman, the diverse ways in which the poet likens his activity to that of carpenters and physicians, or the creative acts of Viśvákarman and Prajāpati. In the Śrauta material, these hymns are used at moments of ritual intensification. In the Grhya material, the hymns are sung at the upakarana ceremony, which begins the Vedic study. In the Vidhana text, these hymns of creation and beginning are used to represent the highest attainment or the abode of immortality, and afterlife. Thus the interpretive history of heaven can be discerned as one that begins by simply depicting the creation of the world by the deity in both Śrauta and Grhya materials, and then switches in the Vidhana material to the end of a properly lived life, the highest abode.

This chapter examines the vitalism entailed in Vedic sacrifice, the Axial transformation of that theme in the Upaniṣads, and the philosophies that attempted to categorize and analyse life into specific components. Finally, we will see how a full philosophy of life comes to articulation in the tantric traditions. All these modes of thinking and practice were deeply concerned about offering repair, correcting ignorance and giving relief from the constant suffering entailed by life, and the desire for life that has so often been negatively evaluated in this history. The chapter examines the earliest sources that articulate some understanding of the category of life itself in terms of sacrifice, namely the Vedic scriptures, and goes on to discuss medieval Brahmanism, the tantric traditions, and modernity.

Pānini prescribes a periphrastic formation using the suffix ām to form the perfect of secondary verbal bases, including causatives and desideratives, and of some other, simple verbal bases. He also discusses the elements ām and liti (“in the perfect”) and the exception amantre “except in the mantra-portion of the Veda.” According to William Dwight Whitney, the periphrastic perfect, which is almost unknown in the Veda, was gradually used in the Brāhmanas, in agreement with the exception amantre stated by Pānini. Pānini also prescribes luk-deletion of the element lI when coming immediately after ām.