Figure 7 illustrates small models of toy carts, excavated at Harappa sites and dating from from 2100 to 1600 BCE. The first fourteen are made of terracotta, the last three are bronze. One shows draught animals (cattle) and all have solid wheels. Items number 13 and 14 do not show that there were wagons with four wheels as had been originally assumed (by Mackay and Wheeler). Figure 8 shows wheels from the side. They are all terracotta and belong to the period from 2600 to 1900 BCE. Some are painted in black and number 15, of which only a small part survives, is painted on both sides. All these wagons that were pulled by cattle show the only type of wagon with which the Indus Civilization was familiar. Similar carts were found in the Near East during the same period, but it is now assumed (by Kenoyer and others) that the Harappan development was autochthonous.
The Rigveda provides us with a different picture. Its chariots (ratha) are pulled by horses and have wheels (cakra) with spokes (ara): 4, 6, 8, 12 or more. The term cakra is a well known Indo-European word: it is related to Greek kuklos from which comes English cycle, Latin circus, Anglo-Saxon hveohl and English wheel. It is combined not only with numerals but with words such as kāla ‘time’ in kālacakra, a powerful ritual; with Viṣṇu in Viṣṇucakra, referring to the god’s wheel or disk; with dharma in dharmacakra, the wheel of dharma, etc. It is often combined with forms of the verbal root vṛt-‘turn’, ‘revolve’, ‘set into motion’. Compare Kikkuli’s vartana and Latin vertere, German werden, English—ward in ‘toward’, ‘outward’, etc. Vedic has related nouns such as pravartana and parivartana, ‘turning’ and ‘setting into motion,’ dharmacakra ‘the wheel of dharma’ (Chapter 16) and cakravartin ‘turner of the wheel’ = ‘ruler’. It will not surprise us that the Rigveda possesses in addition a detailed technical vocabulary with terms for ‘felloe’ (nemi), ‘rim’ (pavi), ‘nave’ (nābhi), ‘linch-pin’ (āṇi), ‘hollow aperture’ (kha), and so on.
The Vedas are, of course, familiar with the distinction between the old cart (śakaṭa) with solid wheels, used for transporting goods, and the new chariot or ratha with wheels with spokes, used for fast movement. And yet, the term śakaṭa, in its feminine form śakaṭī, occurs once in the Rigveda (RV 10.146) where a traveller is lost in a forest. He is alone and frightened. He imagines familiar sounds and sights that are not there: someone calling his cow, someone cutting wood, someone crying out, ‘You think you see cows grazing; you think you see a house; you think a cart (śakaṭī) is rumbling’ (translation Doniger).
The poets of the Rigveda have an obvious preference for the term ratha which refers to the more fashionable and recent discovery. Their coveted knowledge of its difficult construction earned them respect and high prestige. It enabled members of the clan to win the chariot race. They use the term even to refer to an old cart. All of this and more seems to play a role in the fantastic story of Mudgala (RV 10.102), an old sage who hopes to win a chariot race but only owns an old wagon. He asks Indra to transform his faulty old cart into a chariot. Indra needs to do a great deal more to complete this magical transformation, but the goal is reached: Mudgala on his old wagon, with his young and nimble wife as charioteer and pulled by the unlikely pair of a bull and a mysterious wooden club, wins the race and a thousand and one hundred cows.
The Rigveda derives from the terminology of chariots and spokes some of its most sublime puzzles: RV 1.164, in which verse 11 declares: ‘The wheel of time (cakraṃ ṛtasya) with its twelve spokes turns around and around [in] the sky and never ages. Here stand, O Agni, the sons in pairs, seven hundred and twenty.’ The phrase I have translated as ‘turns around and around’ is a rare mode of the verb vṛt- which expresses an intensive act: varvarti. The medieval commentator Sāyaṇa explained it correctly as: punaḥ punar vartate ‘turns again and again.’
The Rigveda contains many riddles, some of them profound and difficult to explain. The present verse is straightforward: it refers to months, days and nights. The Vedas inherited these subdivisions of the year from Mesopotamian astronomy which also influenced China and the modern world, together with other sexagesimal subdivisions such as minutes and seconds. The riddle shows that the Rigveda did not only know chariots with spoked wheels, but that its poets had started to muse about them and explore their imagery.
The tribes who spoke Indo-Aryan imported such chariots into the subcontinent through their oral tradition that is: through their minds. The Rigveda provides plenty of evidence supporting such mental imports. This will give the reader further inklings of Vedic poetry and the playfulness of its poetic imagination. The terms most often used in these contexts are manas ‘mind’ and its declined forms such as manasā ‘with’ or ‘in the mind’. They will engage our attention again in later chapters.
Here are three examples of chariots in the minds of poets. In Rigveda (RV 7.64.4), after invoking Mitra and Varuṇa, the poet describes himself as ‘he who constructs the high seat of the chariot in his mind’ (manasā). RV 10.85, a poem that was later recited during marriage ceremonies, relates how Sūryā, daughter of the Sun (Sūrya), travels in a chariot made of mind (manas), whether it is to her future husband, immortality or the abode of Soma. RV 10.135 is a dialogue between a son and his dead father. The son says: ‘I did not like him looking back at his ancestors and take the evil path. I want him back.’ The father responds: ‘The new chariot without wheels, which you boy have made manasā, which has one draught pole and goes in all directions, standing on it you are seeing nothing.’ The father’s sarcasm has been interpreted as making little of the boy’s play though it is, in fact, concerned with imagination and reality both.
The power of the mind is applicable to the charioteer himself. RV 6.75.6 says: ‘Standing on his chariot, the excellent charioteer leads the horses wherever he wishes. Praise the power of reins: the ropes follow his mind.’ Verse 8 refers to a cart called rathavāhana, a movable platform on which the much lighter chariot (ratha) is transported. It could not be done across a mountain pass, but would be useful in the plains, an idea also transported by mind.
The word manas is often translated as ‘thought’. The uses of manas we have met in our Rigveda contexts point unmistakably to ‘mind’ as the correct translation. ‘Mind’ is a faculty, an inborn capacity of our species. Thoughts are passing things, like the wind.