Having paid much attention to the Rigveda, I shall be relatively brief on the other three Vedas. This is as it should be for several reasons. The Rigveda is the earliest, the most venerable, obscure, distant and difficult for moderns to understand—hence is often misinterpreted or worse: used as a peg on which to hang an idea or a theory. The Sahitā portions of the Yajurveda are in some respects similar. The Sāmaveda takes all its words from it. The Atharvaveda is also similar but stands apart from the other three.
The Sāmaveda or Veda of Melodies or Chants (sāman) consists almost entirely of verse of the Rigveda set to music. There are variant ‘readings’ but the Sāmaveda has to be heard. The melodies were held in extraordinary awe and it looks as if they might not have been created for the sake of the verse, but were in existence already. The reason is not that two melodies are mentioned in the Rigveda by name, but that many of the words do not fit the melody. There were reasons, often ritual, for their selection and incorporation. Sometimes we have a series of chants in which the words fit the music in the first instance but less closely, or hardly at all, in those that follow. It shows that the words for the first had been carefully selected to fit the melody; after which others, different in length and number, were forced into the same format as if confined in a straitjacket. When words do not fit, they are changed or transformed and embellishments called stobha are inserted. They are meaningless like the sounds of a lullaby. According to a commentator, the term stobha is used even in daily life to refer to a meaningless string of sounds, something that may be uttered by a joker for killing time. Much more systematic study is needed, but I believe the melodies were originally sung to the words of another language and that Rigvedins or proto-Rigvedins and Sāmavedins or proto-Sāmavedins worked closely together. As for that other language, there are many candidates as is obvious from Part I. A good phonologist with much Sitzfleisch could deduce the phonology of that language from the changes made in the underlying language of the Rigveda.
The first song of the collection is derived from a Rigvedic verse that starts as: agna ā yāhi vītaye, ‘O Agni, come to the feast.’ It is sung in the Jaiminīya Sāmaveda from which I take most of my illustrations as:
o gnā i / ā yā hi vā i / tā yā i tā yā i /
It is not possible to translate this, but it is obvious that there is a formal correspondence between the original sentence and its Sāmavedic transformation: some vowels are changed, others are added, and some phrases are repeated. No attention is paid to what was originally a word and one suspects that some of the chanters who created these forms may not have understood the language from which they came.
Among the meaningless syllables that are inserted are OM and other famous stobha sounds that anticipate the equally mysterious mantras of Tantrism. Insertion and transformation may have happened on several levels, as in the Rigveda verse: abhi tvā śūra nonumo ‘dugdhā iva dhenavaḥ / ī śānam asya jagataḥ svardrśam ī śānam indra tasthuṣaḥ, ‘we cry out for you, hero, like unmilked cows to the lord of this living world, to the lord of the unmoving world whose eye is the sun O Indra!’ It has been turned into a famous chant called Rathantara, ‘Excellent Chariot’. It is one of the two that the Rigveda mentions. Its Sāmavedic form is: obhitvā śūranonumovā / ādugdhā iva dhenava ī śānamasya jagatassuvārdrśām / ī śānamā indra / tā sthu ṣā o vā hā u vā /ās //
The stobhas are o vā hā u vā and ās. They may occur almost anywhere but have here been put at the end. In the Bhakāra-Rathantara, ‘Excellent Chariot with bha syllables’, there is a more radical transformation into something more powerful and effective: syllables are replaced by others that keep the same vowel but replace the initial consonant by bh. The result is: obhitvā śūranonumovā / o bhu bhā bhi bha bhe bha bha bhī bhā bha bha bhi bha bha bhā bha suvārdrśāmoyi / sānamā yindrā iḍā o sthū ṣā o vā hā u vā / ās //. We may translate/literate as: ‘we cry out for you, hero, bhye bhu-bhi-bhow bhu-bhe-bhoo bho-bhi-bhi-bhi-bho …’
Wayne Howard has transcribed some of these forms in musical notation which gives those who are familiar with it a more realistic idea of how they sound and how long they last. Six: Sāmaveda, and Six: Sāmaveda provide two pages of his transcription. It is clear that chants like these should be studied not only by students of the Vedas but by musicologists. It has been claimed that the Sāmaveda stands at the origin of Indian music. All we can say is that it preserved its earliest surviving form. That such forms are sometimes similar to later forms (such as the Ābhogi raga) is unavoidable, given the great variety of sāman melodies that have survived.
The core of the Sāmaveda consists of ritual chants. They are ranked in the order of the Śrauta rituals we have mentioned but will examine a little more closely in Chapter 12. Famous among them are songs that are called stotra or stuti, a term that also means ‘praise’. Each stuti consists of five portions. The names of three Sāmaveda priests who sing them are based upon the names of three of these chants. The following illustration comes from a Rigvedic verse that addresses Soma and begins: upāsmai gāyatā naraḥ ‘Gentlemen! Join us in chant to him!’ The meaning of the remainder is lost in the remaining four sections that have been replaced or transformed into something else:
- Prelude (prastāva): upāsmai gāyatā narom (chanted by the Prastotā priest facing west);
- Chant (udgītha): om oooooooooo (chanted by the Udgātā facing north);
- Response (pratihāra): huṃ ā (chanted by the Pratihartā facing south);
- Accessory (upadrava): oo (chanted by the Udgātā);
- Finale (nidhāna): sā (chanted by all three).
The reader will have noted that the beginning of the Rigvedic verse has been modified slightly at its end, and that the rest is hidden by other sounds. Such hidden sections are called aniruktagāna ‘unexpressed chant’. Hidden texts like these must be in the minds of the singers for otherwise it is difficult or impossible to chant such long sequences of meaningless syllables. I can learn to sing: bhā bhu bhā bhi bha bhe bha bha when ādugdhā iva dhenavaḥ, ‘like unmilked cows’, is in my mind. Similarly in English. I can learn to sing bhye bhu-bhi-bhough bhu-bhe-bhow’ if and only if I think of: ‘like unmilked cows to the lord’.
Table 2. The ‘Excellent Chariot’ with bha Syllables I
Table 3. The ‘Excellent Chariot’ with bha Syllables II
The difference between sound that is ‘expressed’ (nirukta) and language that is ‘ineffable’ (anirukta) is a large topic in Vedic discourse to which we shall return in Chapter 15. It is related to the distinction between sound, which is limited to what is audible, and language which is not. In the final analysis, language and melodies are infinite but speech is not.
Each of the stuti sections has to be sung in one breath. It is not easy because the chants are long and the chanting of o’s is extraordinary long. Good chanters are trained like opera singers but in a different style. Both need to inhale deeply and produce long breath. Others have to wait for the singers to finish before they can continue with their own recitations and ritual acts. They could easily get lost in oceans of sound that seem to continue for hours and sometimes do. To help them keep on track, the Prastotā gives at the appropriate times signals such as: ‘This is the middle!’ to the Adhvaryu priest of the Yajurveda, general manager of the ritual to whom we return in the next chapter.
Numerous other special chants, recitations and rites surround these songs. At the beginning, the three chanters have already intoned an extended ō hṃ. Udgātā, leader of the Sāmaveda team of three, often has to sing a long sequence of chants with his two colleagues. For each chant he winds blades of grass around his fingers. He will attach them to a pole when the chant is over. These attachments mark the number of chants that have been completed so that nobody gets lost. Prior to the beginning of a stuti, which is the beginning of a series of ritual activities, the Adhvaryu hands the blades of grass to the chanter with the recitation: ‘You are the bed for coupling Rik and Sāman for the sake of procreation!’ Found only in the ritual sūtras, it is a significant statement, as the reader can guess and Chapter 12 will confirm.
Each Sāmaveda chant is followed by a Rigveda recitation called śastra, literally ‘weapon’. It is also ritualized but not hidden: the originals are easily recognized by ritualists and other experts though their order is not the same as in the Rigveda and, when translated, do not make sense. Large ritual performances are defined by the number and identities of such sequences of chants and recitations that take place in the Sadas, a ritual enclosure at the centre of the ritual proceedings where the officiants ‘sit’ (sad-): Sāmavedins to chant their stutis, Rigvedins to recite their śastras, and both to drink Soma. We shall return to all of these in Chapter 13.
Like the Rigvedic śastra ‘weapons’, Sāmavedic chants are powerful. When enemies attack with raised weapons, they should be recited in the mind which is another way of saying that they should be meditated upon. The Yajurveda says: mano vai vācaḥ kṣepīyaḥ, ‘mind is swifter than speech.’ In the Soma ritual, the ‘Outdoor Chant for the Purified Soma’ is preceded by offerings for the selection of the priests. If the Udgātā hates the patron, he should meditate on vāc during those offerings.
Seemingly endless repetition is a characteristic of all ritual chants. Repetitions may be indicated by stage directions. Such directions are marked by iti, ‘thus’, like the end of a verse in the Padapāṭha. Stage directions should not slip into the recitation. Once I recorded a mantra recited by a priest when he gave a stick (daṇḍa) to a boy. The recitation included the final words of a rule: iti daṇḍaṃ dadhyāt, ‘thus he should give the stick.’
Sometimes the opposite happens: something is left out. I traversed South India on an old Royal Enfield. My tape-recorder was packed in a padded aluminium box fixed to its back. The bike often needed repairs and I had to spend time in a garage. Once I arrived late for my recordings of Sāmaveda chants. On the next morning, one of the singers told me that he had omitted one round of repetitions. I made a note of it.
The Sāmaveda possesses meaningless syllables, unexpressed chants and chants with non-Indo-European names, some of them identified as BMAC words. It also reflects the structure of the Yajurvedic Śrauta ritual. The organization and fixation of its chants in one large collection during the Kuru period must have been undertaken in close cooperation with the Yajurvedins, many of them indigenous inhabitants of the subcontinent like the Sāmavedins themselves.