What was it like to live, work, eat, sleep, laugh, or play in the olden times? It shouldn’t be too difficult to visualise that life, I told myself, because just so much text was available from that era.

So I decided to take that what-if and turn it into a weekly newspaper.

Friends, I present to you Indica Times, an independent publication for readers, researchers, and the incorrigibly curious.

Classical texts from ancient India deserve to be read and re-read for themselves. My hope is that Indica Times encourages people to do exactly that.

As it happens, Krishna himself had something to say about death:

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युः
For one who is born, death is certain.

Bhagavad Gita 2.27

How did the major characters in the Mahabharat die? The following pie chart shows the causes.

A few things stand out immediately:

• 68% of the deaths are violent. People are killed sometimes by the most ridiculous of things, such as river-grass-clubs that annihilated the entire Yadav clan. And those who are left behind sometimes die of grief, like Vasudev, Devaki, and Rohini did.
• Not all violent deaths are by weapons. Five people were wrestled to death (Kansa is one among them) and one death was caused by being dashed to the ground (this one is a demon, Ghatotkach, killing another, Alambush). And then there’s one particularly gruesome entry: “kicks and blows”. It is Dhrishtadyumna’s, the fiery Panchal prince who was born with an armour on his body and a sword in his hand, and with the boon that no weapon would kill him.
• Sati appears in the chart. Two of Krishna’s wives, Rukmini and Jambavati, followed him in death. Madri joined Pandu on his pyre, apparently accepting responsibility for what she believed caused his death. The other interesting entry is the one labelled “jumped into the Ganga”. It is Uloopi’s, and it happened after Arjun’s final journey to the Himalayas. But while the text implies that Uloopi’s action was driven by grief, I wonder whether death is implied at all. Uloopi was, after all, a water-person and lived inside the waters.
• The explicitly mentioned natural deaths are only two (these are of Shantanu and Ambika). This might be because of the epic’s focus on warriors, and I know warriors don’t die peaceful deaths. But that still leaves open the question of diseases. It’s not that people didn’t fall ill. For example, Agni himself had been so ill with digestive troubles that he had to ask Krishna-Arjun for help with a high-protein, high-fibre diet. But disease-led deaths seem to be rather sparse. The only such death that’s mentioned explicitly is Vichitravirya’s, caused by wasting away through phthisis.
• The last bar in Figure 1 is remarkable. It is for Balaram departing this world through yoga. Throughout the epic, Balaram is constantly described as a person who is quick to anger (and equally quick to cool down), of immense physical strength, and with eyes that are reddish with intoxication. It is remarkable that someone who is apparently permanently intoxicated is also gigantically powerful and possesses of the mental strength and practice that’s required to enter a state of final samadhi. In my opinion, Balaram is the most underrated “hero” of the epic, but that’s a digression for another day.

Figure 1 shows that more than half of the major characters in the epic died violently. A question that naturally springs to mind, then, is, who are the people who caused most deaths? The answer is in the following bar chart, which shows violent deaths attributed to major characters.

(A note on the numbers: Where the text names a group, such as “the Nivatakavachas” or “the sons of Dhrishtadyumna”, I have counted it as one attribution rather than trying to infer a precise count. Even where the text gives a number, such as “five sons of Shakuni”, I have counted the group as one. The chart therefore shows attributed deaths, not individual deaths.)

The bar chart shows some interesting data that otherwise often gets overlooked in the general cacophony of the Great War:

• Bheem is at the top, which is hardly surprising. He killed all but one of Dhritarashtra’s sons (the only surviving son had defected to Bheem’s side). Additionally, he killed all the Keechak brothers, and all the demons that he crossed paths with. At one point during the Great War, he asks his charioteer whether they have enough weapons. He intends to annihilate the entire enemy army that day, and is exultant when told the counts of the several types of arrows and spears and other weapons that were still at his disposal.
• Ashwatthama is at second position largely because of the butchery on the night after the last day of the Great War.
• The student-teacher pair, Arjun and Drona, killed almost the same number of people. The only difference is that all of Drona’s killings happened on the field of Kurukshetra while Arjun’s includes the ones before and after too. If only the Great War was to be reckoned, it would seem that Arjun killed fewer people than Drona.
• Abhimanyu. Of course. The destruction he unleashed in those few hours inside the chakravyuh is enormous: around 15 named warriors were killed and several more were incapacitated temporarily.

When the blind king, Dhritarashtra, asked his charioteer, “What did my sons and Pandu’s sons do on that blessed field”, was he really asking what they had done on the hallowed ground of Kurukshetra? Maybe. But as a father, I think what he was really asking is: “Who lives? And who’s dead?”

Staying alive on a field of battle owes a lot to how accomplished one is in the art of war. The following image shows the might of the warriors, classified according to Bheeshm’s evaluation right before the armies faced off.

(A note again on the numbers: Where the text names a group, such as “the Trigart princes”, I have counted the group as one attribution. Even where the text gives a number, such as “five sons of Draupadi”, I have counted the group as one.)

As it turns out, Dhritarashtra’s sons, despite being Rathis all, hardly killed anybody; they don’t even find mention in Figure 2. Instead, all of Dhritarashtra’s sons were killed by a son of Pandu (except Yuyutsu, who had defected). And the top killer on Dhritarashtra’s side was neither his sons nor the best friend of his dearest son, but the teacher he had appointed to train all the princes in warfare, and the son of that teacher (both of whom were Maharathis).

If I were to draw a chart of deaths only on the field of Kurukshetra, and only for the main warriors, I would get the following diagram.

(A note: This diagram does not mention Abhimanyu because his death was extraordinary: he was cornered and disarmed collectively by six class-one warriors but the final fatal blow came from a much lesser, un-named warrior simply referred to as “Dusshasan’s son”, and then never referred to again.)

This diagram raises a few questions:

• Bheeshm, that one person universally acclaimed in heaven and on earth to be the most fearsome warrior alive, the man who had fought the dreaded Parashuram for 21 straight days and remained undefeated, did not kill a single class-one warrior of the Pandavas. What was it that stopped him? Age? But that doesn’t explain how he managed to mow down 11,000 soldiers every single day for 10 continuous days. Or was it love for Pandu’s sons? But that still doesn’t explain why he did not go after the other class-one warriors. The only named persons he killed during that entire period were two: Virat’s son Shwet, and a brother of Virat, neither of whom find even a mention in the warrior classification in Figure 3. He also killed some Matsya warriors (probably they were the ones who formed Shwet and his uncle’s defence) and some Panchal warriors; again, none of them find mention in Figure 3. It almost seems like he was more interested in clearing the field of foot soldiers, while also happening to kill minor warriors who came his way. The only person on that battlefield who had more Kuru blood in his veins than anybody else was, in effect, avoiding the opposite party’s leading warriors.
• Ghatotkach killed the demon that had killed his cousin, Iravan. The only other “kill” attributed to him by name is also a demon. If I look at the chronology, Iravan dies on the eighth day and his killer, Alambush lives on till the fourteenth day, when he’s killed on the same night as the other demon, Alayudh. I wonder about this gap. What would’ve happened if Ghatotkach had gone after Alambush on the same day or the very next day that Iravan was killed? If both Alambush and Alayudh had died by the ninth day, then, because of the carnage that Ghatotkach was wreaking, would Duryodhan have asked Karn to use his Shakti weapon? And, despite Bheeshm still being the commander on field, would Karn have stepped on to the field to do so?
• Karn sat out the first 10 days of the Great War. Thereafter, my dataset attributes only one named death unambiguously to him, and it is Ghatotkach’s. Karn was promise-bound not to kill any of the Pandav brothers except Arjun, but this doesn’t explain why he didn’t eliminate other big warriors like Satyaki and Dhrishtadyumna despite getting the better of them on more than one occasion.
• The most surprising pattern in the death register is not about the sons of Pandu and Dhritarashtra. It is about Drona and the Panchals. The Ashwatthama chain in Figure 4 is interesting because it is the visible manifestation of something that’s only implied in the epic. It suggests an alternative way of reading the war: that the Great War can also be seen as a Drona-Panchal war superimposed on the larger Kaurav-Pandava conflict. Throughout the war, Drona (and Ashwatthama) actively and repeatedly go after the Panchal princes. The Panchal king, Drupad, is himself killed by Drona. All of Dhristadyumna’s sons and all of Drupad’s grandsons are killed by Drona and Ashwatthama, and all of the remaining Panchal princes are killed by Ashwatthama. On the 14th day, inarguably the most nightmarish day of the battle, Drona sends a message to Ashwatthama (through Duryodhan), saying, “Kill every Panchal alive”.

“na somakah pramoktavya javitam parirakshata”

“Even at the risk of his life, he should not let any Somak escape”

Drona parva, Section CI
(Somak is an alias of Panchal.)

Not once, not one single time, does Drona mention the elimination of the Pandavas. What he says, instead, just before this injunction to Ashwatthama, is:

“nahatva sarvapanchalan kavachasya vimokshanam”

“I will not remove this armour of mine till I have killed all Panchals”

Drona parva, Section CI

Drona was on the Kaurav side admittedly because of employment debt. He evidently paid off the debt by killing even more warriors than Arjun (classified, in Figure 3, as the one with “no equal”) and by eliminating Abhimanyu (classified by Bheeshm as being Arjun’s equal despite his young age). And yet, the pattern of Drona’s explicitly attributed kills makes his obsession with the Panchals impossible to miss. Why the obsession? Surely such single-minded focus wouldn’t have been caused just by Drupad’s refusal in open court to share his kingdom with Drona? Because that insult had already been squared off by Drona’s guru-dakshina by the Pandav princes. Why, then?

Such questions deserve a separate article altogether. For now, perhaps the best way to end a death register is with Krishna’s own words:

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युर्ध्रुवं जन्म मृतस्य च । तस्मादपरिहार्येऽर्थे न त्वं शोचितुमर्हसि ॥

For one who is born, death is certain; and for one who has died, birth is certain. Therefore, over what is unavoidable, you should not grieve.

Bhagavad Gita, 2.27

Related: Being Arjun

Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).

The youngest child is a special child. Much loved by parents, much pampered by the older siblings. Shielded, guarded, showered with affection.

But what happens when the dynamics shift and the youngest child suddenly becomes the middle brother? Not the eldest. Not the strongest or even the handsomest. And definitely not the one who’ll ultimately inherit the throne. Just the middle brother, although the greatest archer in the world. And what happens when that very excellence keeps sending him away from home?

Ask Arjun. Kunti’s youngest, Drona’s dearest, Draupadi’s husband fair and square, but never at home.

What is home, though?

Straw for a seat, ground to sit upon, water to wash the feet and face, and sweet words.

(Udyog Parva, section XXXVI)

And why is Arjun never at home? The reasons are many.

The first is, on the face of it, domestic. The brothers had agreed that whoever entered the room where Draupadi was present with her husband of that year would, forthwith, be banished for twelve years.

Things were running fine. And then a brahmin came with a problem. His cows had been driven away by rustlers, and he was beside himself with anger that such a thing could happen under a Pandava rule. Arjun immediately rushed out to the armoury to pick up his bow and quiver. And there he found Draupadi and Yudhishthir. Why Yudhishthir chose the armoury, of all places, to spend time alone with Draupadi is a question the epic, tellingly, leaves open.

The Pandavas had just been given Khandavprastha. They had just finished months and months of hiding from their murderous cousins, and had just settled down in what was, perhaps, their very first owned home ever. They had just got themselves a new bride. And Arjun, the reason why the bride was even won, had to now leave, to be away for years together.

So he leaves. And wanders all over the land.

It is telling that the epic calls these two sequential episodes Rajya-labh-parva (the acquisition of a kingdom) and Arjun-vanavas-parva (the exile of Arjun). No sooner had a home been acquired that Arjun was exiled to preserve the harmony of the very home he had played a large role in creating. It is the beginning of a pattern: the Pandavas settle into domestic life and Arjun leaves shortly thereafter.

Not long after his return from exile, Arjun, along with his best friend Krishna, cleared away a big patch of forest and got the best architect in the world to build them a palace, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Soon after shifting into this wonderous palace, the oldest brother and king, Yudhishthir, decided to do a grand complicated yagna called the Rajasuya. The remaining four brothers, Arjun included, were despatched on army missions to extract vows of suzerainty from other kingdoms. Arjun was sent north.

The northern campaign of Arjun’s was paralleled by three of his brothers (who went east, west, and south). The epic is rather too explicit about the contrast:

Thus while his brothers were so employed, the exalted king Yudhishthir, the just, stayed within Khandavaprastha in the enjoyment of great affluence in the midst of friends and relatives.

(Digvijaya Parva, section XXV)

But for the next journey, Arjun was again the sole traveller. The eldest brother gambled away every single thing that the other brothers had brought home, because of which all five brothers and Draupadi had to leave for the forests. After roaming around in various places for a while, Yudhishthir sent Arjun away again.

The reason this time was: when the time comes for the Pandavas to claim back what the eldest brother had so injudiciously lost, their cousins wouldn’t willingly hand over everything, and in the war that would inevitably follow, it would help if Arjun was better equipped, and what better way to equip himself than by acquiring weapons of the gods themselves?

So, Arjun left home again. To acquire celestial weapons so that they could all win back the home that Yudhishthir had thrown away in a game of dice.

Things moved fast after Arjun’s return, culminating in the great war and a pyrrhic victory for the Pandavas.

But Yudhishthir wasn’t done yet. He decided to do another complicated yagna called the Ashwamedh. And this time, it was only Arjun who was despatched, in the footsteps of the horse whose hooves would stamp the territory over which Yudhishthir ruled.

It was a somewhat stressful journey, in that Arjun had to encounter, first-hand, the ravages of the just concluded Great War. Toddlers on the throne, empty treasuries, and then there was that matter of him being killed by his own son (and revived by one of his wives).

A little after his return, Arjun’s mother left home for spiritual retreat into the forests. And a few years thereafter, Arjun was despatched yet again, this time to look into some disturbing news about Dwaraka.

But this journey was heart-breakingly different. Arjun did not just leave home this time, he went to another home that had ceased to exist as he had known, loved, and sported in. Dwaraka was gone.

Arjun stood before the heaving sea with folded hands, and hurled his grand bow and divine quiver into it. His refuge had disappeared; his prized weapons were no longer of any use.

He returned to Hastinapur only to depart again, this time for ever, along the snow-sprinkled paths in the Himalayas.

When asked about his ten names once, Arjun had mentioned Shweta-vahan, “he whose chariot is pulled by white horses”, as one of them. He might well have added another, Satata-pravasi , “one who is forever on the road”. Perhaps home, for him, was never a fixed abode. Perhaps he carried his refuge with him. For, hadn’t the good lord himself said,

अनिकेतः स्थिर-मतिर् भक्तिमान् मे प्रियो नरः

One with no fixed home and unflinching devotion in me is the one who is exceedingly dear to me.

(Bhagwat Gita, 12.19)

Perhaps that is what Arjun’s secret home was, maybe?

Related: On deaths in the Mahabharat

Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).

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.

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.

Related:

• On the gods of the Rig Veda
• On the poets of the Rig Veda

Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).

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?

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.

Related:

• On the gods of the Rig Veda
• On the meters of the Rig Veda

Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some).

The Rig Veda fascinates me. It is not only an anthology of hymns to a pantheon that we honour, but is also, simultaneously, a tableau of our own attention-maps. Along with reading the Rig Veda hymn by hymn, I also treated it as a dataset. I counted which gods receive the most hymns, which gods are invoked together, how they vary across the mandals, and what these patterns might tell us about the Vedic imagination. Which gods do we fear and worship the most (and the least)? Which gods were once regarded as the greatest but have now been relegated to a somewhat lower order? What held our attention and faith throughout the vicissitudes of existing and thriving in our lands?

To begin with, who are the gods in the Rig Veda? How often are they invoked?

The pie charts show the share of suktas among the gods in the Rig Veda. At first glance, the following things stand out:

• Indra dominates. And, Agni is almost as important as Indra.
• There’s a huge ‘Others’ category. So huge, in fact, that this long tail gets exploded into two smaller charts, and still ends up with a large ‘Others’ category.
• Soma, who is at once a god, a plant, and a drink, is at #3.
• Vishnu and Rudra rank lower (they appear only in Pie chart 2a) than the Ashwini twins, who are very visible in Pie chart 1 but are nowhere to be seen in any temple today. Why did they fade from public memory despite being honey-hued healers, rushing everywhere to bring comfort to the distressed?
• The third chart (Pie chart 2b) is full of things that feel strange as objects of hymns. Subandhu’s spirit?! Ah, therein lies a story. It’s a story about a king who, on the instigation of a crafty duo, dismissed his family priests (Subandhu and brothers) and appointed the duo in their stead. How Subandhu was rendered senseless by this duo, and how his brothers coaxed his spirit to return to his body, is the subject matter of a few suktas in the Rig Veda. Perhaps a story for another day.

But the chart also raises a question: Who makes up such a long tail, individually negligible but collectively larger than Indra himself? Can I draw up a ranking based on how frequently a god was sung to?

This chart shows that almost 125 gods (55.3%) have only one or two songs to them, and it’s the remaining 100 that, progressively, keep getting a larger share of the suktas till there’s a sharp jump for about a dozen gods. Even among this dozen, the top 2 gods (Indra and Agni) are the top 2 by an extremely wide margin.

Which, then, makes me ask: If Indra and Agni dominate, is it because they are invoked alone, or is it because they accompany everyone else? The next chart separates solo calls from collective invocations.

What I see in this chart for the top 18 gods is this:

• Indra, Agni, and the Ashwini twins appear alone almost as frequently as they are paired with others.
• Soma is a loner, with the highest proportion of solo calls.
• The remaining gods tend towards being part of a group.

In this chart, I have not included the entire pantheon of gods (due to space constraints) but if I had, you would’ve seen that 155 gods are never ever invoked alone. That’s more than half the pantheon, at 68.6%.

The following divine beings are almost always invoked together, as a group: Nakt, Usha, Ila, Saraswati, Grass, Vanaspati, Door, Svaha, Tvashta. Not surprising at all, come to think of it. Because it is at that silent, liminal moment when night (Nakt) is bleeding into dawn (Usha) that our minds open to receive the inspiration we need to forge and carve our own selves into offerings that blend into the very earth that sustains us, is it not?

Is that the reason why this Usha-Nakt group is at the core of many Apri hymns (which are a very specific formula of hymns that precede an offering made to one’s chosen god)?

But that’s just one striking “collective”. Are there others? I found no other such remarkable groups, but I did notice that some of the top gods continually keep appearing in each other’s suktas: Agni, Mitra, Varun, Marut, Pushan, the Ashwin twins, Vishwadeva, Aryama, Bhaga, and Aditi. It’s almost like they are travelling companions, hopping on to each other’s chariots whenever a situation so demands.

Are there any special pairings, though, I asked. And found that, indeed, there were.

Mitra and Varun are virtually inseparable. They are called together 30% more often than any other god pair. What is even more striking is that of his 90 invocations, Mitra has only 1 solo invocation; of Varun’s 113 calls, only 8 are for Varun alone. They exist together. Later Puranic lore tells me that they even fathered sons together: both Agastya and Vasishth (themselves poets of the Rig Veda) are sons of these two gods and hence bear the patronymic Maitravaruni.

The other inseparable pair is Dyau and Prithivi. Heaven and Earth. They’re called together 30 times when Dyau has 31 total invocations and Prithivi has 33. It means that almost every appearance of theirs is together.

It’s almost as if many gods are meaningful less in isolation than in ritual situations where blessings are needed from all cosmos. To me, this suggests that divinity in the Rig Veda is situational. Some of the gods aren’t ‘gods’ in the usual sense but have become sacred and worship-worthy for a small time in a very specific context. Like those shining planets that flare briefly into visibility before vanishing behind the brighter sun and moon.

Which brings me to the next question, the one about dominance. Why are some gods so dominant? Is it because they cluster in any of the mandals, and these mandals are the largest ones? Or is there a winner-takes-all theme here, where three or four gods corner almost the entire corpus?

Here’s a chart that shows the prominence of gods across mandals. By prominence, I mean the share of total suktas in a mandal.

This chart displays only the nine most prominent gods in each mandal and, therefore, the percentages in each column might not add up to 100%. The remainder represents the long tail of other gods.

I see some interesting patterns here:

• Mandal 9 is dominated almost entirely by just one god, namely, Soma. The god who’s described as the shining drop of nectar in the sky. Had mandal 9 not been there in the Rig Veda corpus, Soma wouldn’t have been at rank #3 in the listings (of Figure 1) at all. Soma, the loner god, whose invocations are 75% solo invocations.
• Indra dominates almost all mandals, except mandal 9 (the Soma mandal) where he has zero prominence. In the mandals that he doesn’t dominate, he’s second, and it’s always to Agni.
• In mandals 2, 6, and 7, almost half the prominence is shared by other gods; in mandal 10, the other gods are actually in the majority.
• The Ashwini twins occupy the middle order (ranks 3 to 6) in several mandals.
• Pushan is at rank #3 in mandal 6, behind only Indra-Agni. He’s also the only god, along with Usha, who is present in every mandal (even though not as a top 9 god). Pushan, the animal-loving guide-god who leads a bride to her new marital home.

• The Ribhu brothers at rank #3 in mandal 4, behind only Indra-Agni, and they appear in all mandals except for mandal 9 (the Soma mandal). These brothers are human and are master craftsmen with magic fingers. By their expertise and industry, they won the right to sit at the same table as the gods and drink Soma with them.
• Usha is the only god other than Pushan who is present in every mandal, even when she isn’t among the top 9 gods (which she is in five mandals). Usha, she who rules the universal truth, the very cosmic order itself (ऋतस्य देवी).

What qualifies as ‘divine’, then, in the Rig Veda? Doors, grass, rivers, winds, herbs, plants, poison, frogs, birds, armour, chariots, they’re all gods. The divine order in the Rig Veda is not an immutable order, at least for the most part. Indra-Agni are the top 2 by a prominent margin, and Varun-Marut-Mitra are invoked often enough as are the Ashwini twins, so there is, indeed, a stable core. But then, there are gods like Soma, who have almost an entire mandal to themselves, and then there’s the long tail.

It’s noteworthy that the poet who wrote the title to this article (“kasmai devaye havisha vidhema”) never actually names his god either. For ten stanzas, the poet paints his concept of god as a shining, glorious entity, but ends every stanza by asking “and who is this being that we should give this sacrifice to”.

हिरण्यगर्भः समवर्तताग्रे भूतस्य जातः पतिरेक आसीत् । स दाधार पृथिवीं दयामुतेमां कस्मै देवाय हविषा विधेम ॥ RV, 10.121

The next question, then, is no longer about the gods themselves but about the poets who sang these hymns to them. Who were these poets? Did they favour certain gods? Did their hymns favour some specific metres? And did metre itself play any role in shaping their devotion?

That is where I’ll go next. These are stories that need separate articles.

I had imagined that treating the Rig Veda as a dataset would make it tidier. Instead, it has become gloriously untidy. Every time I lean back, confident that I’ve finally managed to arrange its world neatly into rows, columns, and pie charts, it deftly slips a god into a blade of grass or into a bowstring that whispers to its warrior, and asks me whether I counted that. Every chart answers one question only to raise two more. I count the gods, and the poets appear. I arrange the poets into neat rows, and the metres peep in from around the corner, grinning at me. I am beginning to suspect that this is how the Rig Veda prefers itself to be read.

Related:

• On the poets of the Rig Veda
• On the meters of the Rig Veda

Data sources: The Indica APIs (and all the books mentioned therein, and then some)