On the meters of the Rig Veda
Gayatri chhandasam aham (Of the meters, I am Gayatri)
Rig Veda is poetry. Its verses have a certain lilt, beat, and rhythm, a meter that turns the words into charming intonations when recited aloud. Each of its verses is sung in a very specific manner, according to the meter that it is set in. A poet has a thought, and then that thought is expanded or compressed into the framework of the syllables and rhythm of a meter such that the thought flows towards the chosen god.
What are these meters called? How many are there? The answer is in the following pie chart which shows the share of meters in the suktas of the Rig Veda. In the pie, the “Others” slice, which holds all meters that account for less than 1% of the total, is exploded into a bar chart.
At first glance, the following things stand out:
- Trishtup dominates, accounting for 38% of the corpus.
- Jagati and Gayatri together make up about 30% of the corpus.
- The remaining meters (Anushtup, Brihati, Pankti, and the long tail beyond them) together account for about 32% of the corpus.
These observations lead me to ask some questions:
- Why does Trishtup dominate? Is it associated with the top gods or poets?
- Do certain gods prefer certain meters? Or, certain poets prefer certain meters?
But before I explore these questions, let me first understand the framework of these top meters. What does Trishtup look and feel like? Or, Gayatri? Or, Ushnik, where the name itself conjures an image of shining heat?
- Trishtup has 4 lines of 11 syllables each.
- Jagati is 4 lines of 12 syllables each; Gayatri is 3 lines of 8.
- Anushtup is 4 x 8 and Pankti is 5 x 8.
- Brihati starts with two short lines of 8 syllables each, has a longer third line of 12 syllables, and ends with an 8-syllable line. 8–8–12–8.
- Ushnik is 2 shorter lines of 8 syllables and then a longer final line of 12 syllables (8–8–12).
Imagine a poet sitting by the riverside watching a dragonfly flit away to another reed every time a small wave shakes the grasses on the bank. The poet sees. Grass-drowning-river, “trina-plavak-sindhu”, thinks the poet and ponders upon meters: the Trishtup meter (11 syllables) means the river epithet trina-plavak-sindhu (7 syllables) either needs to be expanded to fill the remaining syllables or maybe have a verb accompanying it. Something like “Come, grass-drowning-river, flood!” maybe. If, however, the poet were to choose Ushnik, they would have to fill only 8 syllables that are needed for the first line, and might use only a vocative: “O grass-drowning-river” to fill the small gap that the 7-syllable trina-plavak-sindhu would leave.
So, now that I know the rhythm of the meters, let me see the distribution of meters in suktas to the top gods.
This chart has no surprises; the top meters here are also the ones that have the largest slices in the pie chart in Figure 1.
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What’s more interesting is that:
- All of the rarer meters have been used for at least one top god; it’s not that they were reserved for only the situational gods in the long tail.
- Of the top gods, Indra-Agni have the most rare meters songs. This is not unexpected, because they’re the top two gods in the entire pantheon and across mandals.
- All top gods have a marked preference for Trishtup, except for Soma who prefers Gayatri.
- For the gods who prefer Trishtup, there isn’t much of a difference in the percentage points for their choices of second and third preference, which alternates between Gayatri and Jagati, except for two gods: Pushan, who has three meters tied at the second place, and the Ashwini twins, whose second and third choices are Jagati and Anushtup.
The next chart shows the relationship between poets and meters.
At first glance the pattern is consistent with Figure 1. Top meters are the ones that top poets use.
What’s interesting is that:
- All of the top poets prefer Trishtup, except Gotam and Medhatithi. They prefer Gayatri, the one with the shorter bursts of 8 syllables in 3 lines, to the more expansive Trishtup (11-syllable, longer words in every line, 4 times).
- 40% of the meters are never used by any of the top poets, and many of these meters are among the rarely used meters.
- After their second or third preference, quite a few poets don’t seem to have any clear preference to any meter. Except for Vishwamitra.
Figure 3 gives me pause. Trishtup is the most common meter overall, so of course the songs of top poets (except for Medhatithi and Gotam) are in Trishtup, especially because both Indra and Agni favour Trishtup. That’s only expected. But is there a reason why Trishtup isn’t the top choice for Medhatithi and Gotam?
To answer that question, I have to think back to all discoveries I’ve made till now, and tabulate them. In the following table, I omit Indra and Agni because they are universally top gods; I also omit Trishtup, which is the top meter for all top gods except Soma.
I would now expect that the meters in column 3 of Table 2 are, at the very least, the second and third choice of meters for these poets in Figure 3. Are they?
They are, except for an interesting thing about those two poets again: Gotam and Medhatithi. Both of them are poets from mandal 1; Medhatithi is the second ranked poet in that mandal and Gotam is the fourth. Both have Gayatri as their top meter. For Gotam, I would’ve expected the second favoured meter to be Jagati (per Table 2) but it’s Trishtup; Jagati is his third preference. For Medhatithi, I would’ve expected Jagati to be his second-ranked meter, but it’s Anushtup, and he actually has zero songs in Jagati even though his third-preferred god, Marut, has the most hymns in Jagati (after Trishtup).
Which brings me to the question: Is a meter used more than expected or maybe less than expected by a poet for a specific god?
I have here two charts to look at now. One that shows combinations occurring more frequently than expected from the overall distribution in the Rig Veda, and the second that shows combinations occurring less frequently than expected. I’ve taken only the top poets, top gods, and top meters into account to show the bars on the charts.
Gotam seems to have a mind of his own; the strongest departures, both positive and negative, are by him. Also, he appears more often than the other poets in the positive chart. For not using a standard meter, several poets stand out and it is interesting that this departure is for the top two gods, Indra and Agni.
I had always thought Rig Veda was mainly about gods. But now I am beginning to think it might be as much about meters too. When I started writing this article, I assumed that Gayatri would come out tops, especially because Krishna himself says so in the Bhagwad Gita “गायत्री छन्दसामहम्” (“Of all the meters, I am Gayatri”).
My own data disagreed at every turn: Trishtup dominates the corpus, the gods, the poets. Gayatri’s real foothold is more specific: it is Soma’s meter, and Gotam’s and Medhatithi’s.
Why, then, is Gayatri the meter that later tradition has singled out for reverence? Is it because the opening hymn of the Rig Veda is to Agni and is sung in Gayatri? Or, is it because the single most recited verse today, the Gayatri mantra (which is not to Soma), is in the Gayatri meter and composed by Vishwamitra Gathin, a top poet whose second-most preferred meter is Gayatri? I don’t know. It’s an exploration path that I’ll have to embark upon soon.
Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).
