Vedic ritual as medium in ancient and pre-colonial South Asia: its expansion and survival between orality and writing

Abstract

The earliest more or less datable events in South Asia's cultural history, the death of the Buddha and the composition of Pāṇini's grammar - respectively five and four centuries before the beginning of the common era - antedate with one to two centuries the start of a slow and hesitant shift from orality to the written transmission of sacred and literary texts in South Asia. With regard to Vedic texts we have, moreover, clear indications that their transmittors avoided and evaded their transferral to a written form for a very long time, whereas Buddhist scriptures, for instance, were transferred from purely oral to mainly written transmission much earlier. We are therefore confronted with a tradition of Vedic texts stretching over at least two to three millennia, out of which only the last few centuries show a tangible text transmission in written form, usually parallel with a gradually weakening oral and ritual tradition that to varying degrees takes occasional or even systematic support from by that time available written sources. Since directly datable written sources are not available before kings start to record their opposition to or support of Vedic ritual in inscriptions (from king Aśoka in the third century B.C.E. onwards) and since an oral tradition that is not embedded in a very strong ritual context is extremely fluid, we have to study the properties of another medium, next to oral sources and written sources in the form of inscriptions and manuscripts, if we would like to trace the Vedic Aryans in the Indian subcontinent. This other medium is ritual. In the present paper the focus is not so much on the messages transmitted through Vedic ritual but rather on its intrinsic properties and chronological and geographical parameters. Just as the television appeared at a certain point in the history of humanity, had to compete first with other media like print and the radio, and after a period of expansion again with other media such as the computer that restrict its niche in the domains where it had initially expanded, like that Vedic ritual appeared at a certain point in South Asian cultural history, it may have had to compete with other media and especially with other ritual systems of which we know very little, and it later on saw its niche severely restricted in domains where it had initially expanded when new media, such as the transmission of ideas through written and later printed texts, became important.

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