On the poets of the Rig Veda
Kah kasmai gayati (Who sings? To whom?)
Poets sing. They cajole a sleeping child to wake up, they beseech a loved one to stay, they sing of the shining honey-drop in the night sky, they sing to the sparkling river, they implore the clouds to crackle, they sing.
The Rig Veda, an anthology of life and living, presents a lyrical tapestry of poets who sang their hearts out. Who were these poets, I wonder. The answer is in the following bubble chart, which presents the Rig Veda poets by number of hymns they composed.
What strikes me immediately is:
- There’s a huge ‘Others’ category.
- The top poet has about a hundred suktas, the next three each have around half that, and then the fifth poet trails further behind at about a third.
- Several poets have fewer than half a dozen suktas to their name.
At first glance, it would seem that the Rig Veda, as an anthology, is welcoming of any song that is good. Perhaps a poet did not need to belong to a small elite for their song to be accepted into the collection.
But the chart also raises a question: Despite the distributed authorship, there do exist a couple of large bubbles. Who were these top poets?
- Vasishth, Bharadwaj, and Vamadev are, in that order, the top three.
- It is evident from the patronymics that more than one person from the same family has a place at the top. It makes me wonder whether these poets are clustered in specific mandals or whether they stride, like a colossus, across the entire corpus.
The following graphic shows the presence of poets across mandals. At first glance, there seems to be no cross-mandal striding.
A note here: The percentage values in the mandal columns do not add up to 100% unless that mandal has 9 or fewer distinct poets. The remainder represents the long tail of minor poets, as shown in the following table.
Now, some interesting patterns are visible:
- Mandals 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 are the exclusive territory of just a handful of poets.
- Mandal 10 is extremely dispersed. For every one song by a top poet, there are four songs by a scattering of other poets.
- Families rule quite a few mandals. From patronymics, it is evident that mandal 2 belongs to the Bhargavs and mandal 5 to the Atris. A large portion of mandal 3 is composed by the Vishwamitra family. Even though outsiders find a place in the corpus, the overall dominance is still familial.
- Mandal 2 has just 3 poets, all belonging to the same family. Mandal 7 has no poet other than a father, Vasishth, and his sons.
I find this clustering and dispersion interesting. It makes the corpus a living, growing, organic entity. Mandals 1 and 10 are traditionally reckoned to be the newest in the corpus, mandals 2 through 7 the oldest, with mandals 8 and 9 falling somewhere in between. In the charts and tables here, I see a moderate concentration of poets in Mandal 1 (one of the newer mandals) while authorship in mandal 10 (the other comparatively new mandal) is extremely dispersed. I wonder who these others were, stepping up with their own creations, oftentimes equally beautiful if not better, to fill a void, a need, a demand for more songs? Does it show an increasing network of poets? Or is it the opposite: a fragmentation of groups (the story behind the birth of the Taittiriya Upanishad comes to my mind here, but that’s perhaps a subject for a later article).
But that’s just one possible explanation. I also wonder whether other factors were at play, such as an increasing geographical circle of influence? I’ll park that thought here for the time being and move on to that other interesting thing, which is the exclusivity of Vasishth in mandal 7. What happens to Vasishth if I remove mandal 7 altogether from the reckoning of top poets?
If mandal 7 were not to be reckoned, Vasishth drops out from any top slot altogether. He then has only a minor presence in mandal 9 (with just 3 suktas). This change in ranking reminds me of Puranic stories of the long-running, generations-spanning feud between Vishwamitra and Vasishth. This coincidence raises an intriguing possibility in my mind. How much of Vasishth’s dominance in the Rig Veda is due to later editorial curation, I wonder. I want to hold the thought that the Vishwamitra-Vasishth rivalry did not begin with a tussle over a cow (as the Puranic stories say) but with the Ten-kings-war of the Rig Veda, where Vishwamitra’s hymns failed to work for his king, who had wanted to use the waters to reach the enemy army, and who then appointed Vasishth to get the rivers to do the needful.
A couple of suktas by Vishwamitra in mandal 3 are almost in the nature of curses upon Vasishth and, if folklore is to be believed, are not recited even today by anyone who claims descent from Vasishth.
But, let me leave my conjectures aside and turn my attention back to the poems, the songs, the substance of the Rig Veda itself.
Did poets have favourite gods? Why do some gods dominate? Is it because these gods are the top ones in a mandal that’s dominated by any poet family?
Get Anindita Basu’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The following table summarises the mandal relationships of gods and poets. Indra and Agni are omitted from the reckoning because they occupy the top two slots in every mandal except mandal 9, the (special) Soma mandal. The last column can have more than 3 gods if they’re tied for the second or third rank in that mandal.
Some interesting patterns become emerge:
- Varun and Mitra are the top deities of the Vasishth family, which is descended from Varun and Mitra (as evident from the patronymic). I wonder which came first, the stories about the parentage or the hymns to the parents?
- The Ribhu brothers are noticeable in mandal 4. Tradition holds these three brothers to have been humans who had earned a place in the god pantheon through their sheer skill and expertise as craftsmen. It’s interesting that they appear as a top god in mandal 4 (an older mandal) but are completely absent in today’s world. It is a line of enquiry worth exploring later.
- Across most mandals, top poets kept singing to the same core group of gods. Varun, Mitra, the Ashwini twins, and Marut appear again and again, regardless of which family held the mandal. But it’s not universal: mandal 4 belongs to Ribhu, mandal 6 gives Pushan the top slot, and mandal 9 is Soma’s, and Soma’s alone.
So, families do cluster around mandals, and they mostly keep to the same devotional core, but what about individual poets? Did the poets, even when collectively following a family line, have their own special preferences?
The following chart stacks gods by poets, where the stack size is the percentage of invocations by a poet for a god. Indra and Agni continue to be top gods (as expected) but what else is apparent?
The poet who immediately catches my eye is Asit, who does not have even a single sukta to Indra, the topmost god in the pantheon. Instead, Asit focuses his entire devotion on Soma. This is not entirely strange. Asit has 20 suktas, and all these suktas are in mandal 9 (the Soma mandal).
If I were to consider Asit an outlier, and remove Indra and Agni from the reckoning, what would the god-poet association look like?
What I see is:
- Almost half the invocations of all poets (and, sometimes, a bit more than a half) are to gods who are not top rankers at all. Rather, these gods belong to the long tail.
- Vasishth leans towards Varun, and Bharadwaj to Pushan. Neither preference is unexpected. Pushan is top god in mandal 6 (Bharadwaj family mandal) and Varun is top god in mandal 7 (Vasishth family mandal).
- The Ashwini twins and Marut both get noticeable attention from Agastya, and Soma and Marut get noticeable attention from Gotam. Again, not entirely unexpected. Agastya is a top poet in mandal 1, where the Ashwini twins and Marut are among the top two gods. What’s unexpected is Gotam’s preference. Gotam is a mandal 1 poet, and Soma is only a minor presence in mandal 1.
It looks like the top poets of the Rig Veda have, by and large, no personal preference to gods. Or, wait, is it because of their personal preference that their chosen gods dominate the Rig Veda? My next question, then, becomes: Does a poet sing to a god more than expected or less than expected? I’ve already seen Gotam’s preference to Soma. How unexpected (or expected) is it? What about the others?
The following chart shows how much more (or less) frequently a god appears in a poet’s oeuvre as compared to the overall frequency of that god in the entire corpus.
I see some very interesting things, especially because I see some zero values too, but let me list my observations step by step:
- Asit’s preference to Soma is almost 8 times more than expected. That’s a very strong preference indeed.
- Bharadwaj leans very strongly towards Pushan and Indra. The other poet who has a stronger than expected leaning towards Indra is Vishwamitra.
- Agastya shows a marked preference towards the Ashwin twins and Marut. Here again I am reminded of a story, the one about Indra and Marut getting into a territorial fight (or sibling rivalry, depending on your viewpoint) and Agastya calming both of them down and getting them to sit and eat together as companions. A story for another article, perhaps.
- Vasishth shows a preference to Varun and Mitra. I don’t find that unusual, seeing as he is their son but if I go strictly by numbers alone, it is still noteworthy.
- Usha is the only divine being that every top poet has sung to. I’m parking this for further exploration but I wonder whether it’s because of her presence in the Apri hymns and whether all of these poets have at least one Apri hymn to them.
- The omissions are interesting. Asit, as I have seen earlier, cannot really be bothered to sing to anybody unless it is Soma. Vamadev has zero songs to Mitra, and Dirghatamas does not have a single song to Soma, Marut, and Pushan. However, because the expected counts for Mitra, Soma, Marut, and Pushan aren’t large, the omission by Vamadev and Dirghatamas isn’t material either.
But by and large, the poets show neither any startling preference to any god nor any notable antipathy.
So, did poems just arise in the consciousness of poets, fully formed? Tradition would answer that question in the affirmative. It holds that poets are seers, they “see” a song and articulate it. But songs have rhythms. Songs have a lilt, a cadence, a meter. Did these poets see these songs in certain specific meters that were shaped by their own unspoken affinity to that meter? Did their gods have any special affinity to specific meters, and staged their own songs in that very meter for the poet to see?
That’s where I’ll go next. I’ll explore whether poetic meter itself reveals hidden patterns of devotion, and whether gods are linked to these rhythms.
Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).
