Thirty Rigveda Manuscripts at Pune Were Entered in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007, and the Chanting Method That Keeps the Hymns Word for Word Was Listed in 2008

In June 2007 UNESCO entered 30 Rigveda manuscripts from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune on its Memory of the World Register, its list of documentary heritage. The National Mission for Manuscripts, a Government of India programme, lodged the nomination on the institute’s behalf under reference 2006-58. The set holds one birch-bark manuscript from Kashmir and 29 paper copies, and the oldest dated copy was written in 1464 CE.

A year later UNESCO listed a second way of keeping the same hymns. In 2008 it inscribed the Tradition of Vedic chanting on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, having first proclaimed it in 2003. The tradition is a training in which Brahmin priests learn the Vedas by voice from childhood, with the pitch accents and the word order fixed.

What the 30 manuscripts are

The nomination form names three kinds of item. The Rigvedasamhita is the continuous text of the hymns. The Padapatha is the same text with every word separated from its neighbours, so the reader can see where one word ends. The bhashya is a commentary, here the one by Sayana, which the form calls one of the oldest available commentaries on the text.

By the form’s count, nine of the 30 hold only the basic text, five add the Padapatha and sixteen carry Sayana’s commentary. In another passage the same form gives thirteen for the commentary, so the two figures do not agree. It also says at least five of the manuscripts preserve the complete text, which it calls rare for a work of such age.

The 29 paper copies are in Devanagari script. The one on birch bark, number 5/1875-76, is in Sharada, the script that was used in medieval Kashmir. The form says no such manuscript can now be had in Kashmir itself. Birch bark was the main writing surface there until paper became common. George Bühler, who toured the valley in search of manuscripts, wrote about that shift in his 1877 report, as Niyati Bhat summarises it in Granta. Another birch-bark manuscript from the north-west is the Bakhshali manuscript. The oldest dated item is number 5/1882-83, copied in 1464 CE. The form says the 30 were gathered from Kashmir, Gujarat, the then Rajputana and the Central Provinces. BORI’s own manuscript page repeats the birch-bark entry and says the Rigveda collection is a recognised part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World heritage.

How the copies reached Pune

All 30 come from what BORI calls the Government Collection. The form says the Government of Bombay appointed Bühler and F. Kielhorn in 1868 to search for manuscripts. BORI’s page puts the start of the pan-Indian project at 1866. The form tabulates what each collector gathered: Bühler 3,118 manuscripts between 1868 and 1881, Kielhorn 970, R. G. Bhandarkar 6,681, and Peter Peterson 4,606.

The collection sat first at Elphinstone College in Bombay and moved to Deccan College in Pune in 1878, because Bombay’s climate was judged poor for manuscripts. When BORI was founded in 1917, Lord Willingdon, then Governor of Bombay, ordered the transfer to the new institute, which BORI dates to 1918. P. K. Gode became its first curator, and the institute later produced the critical edition of the Mahabharata from its collections. The form counted about 28,000 manuscripts at the institute in 2007, and BORI’s page now gives 29,510: 17,877 in the Government Manuscript Library and 11,633 in other collections.

Twenty-eight of the 30 Rigveda manuscripts had been microfilmed by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi when the form was written. Twenty-six were described in the first volume of a Government of Bombay catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts, published in 1916.

The hymns inside, and a date that is argued

Of the several schools of the Rigveda, the form says only one text has survived, that of the Shakala branch. It has 1,028 hymns in ten books called mandalas, a word that means circles. Books 2 to 7 are the family books, each traditionally credited to one line of sages, among them Gritsamada, Vishvamitra, Vamadeva, Atri, Bharadvaja and Vasishtha. Book 9 is devoted to Soma.

The age of the text is stated differently by different authorities. Britannica, in an article by Wendy Doniger, says no definite date can be ascribed to the Vedas, but that 1500 to 1200 BCE is acceptable to most scholars. UNESCO’s Vedic chanting page says the Vedas were composed over 3,500 years ago. The nomination form goes further than either, calling the Rigveda the earliest literary document in the world; UNESCO’s own register entry softens that to “among the first literary documents in the history of humankind”. The Indian government release carried by Hindu Press International, dated 21 June 2007, drops the “among” and calls the Vedas the first literary documents in human history. This article reports each as the claim of the document that makes it, and ranks nothing.

One point in the form needs care. It says Max Müller used manuscript 5/1875-76 for his edition, which it dates to 1849. BORI’s page dates the Kashmir collection to 1875 to 1876, so that copy cannot have been used for a volume printed in 1849. The form does not say which volume or later edition it means, and none of the sources opened for this article settle it.

What UNESCO’s 2008 listing says about the voice

The listing, number 00062 on the Intangible Heritage lists, was nominated by India and inscribed in 2008 at the third session of the Intergovernmental Committee. UNESCO’s text says the value of the tradition lies partly in the techniques the Brahmin priests use to keep the texts intact over thousands of years. Learners are taught complex recitation methods from childhood, built on tonal accents, a set manner of pronouncing each letter and specific speech combinations, so that the sound of each word does not change.

The 2003 proclamation came on 7 November 2003. According to the Indian government statement carried by Hindu Press International, the Department of Culture put forward the candidature, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts prepared the presentation, and a five-year plan to safeguard and promote the oral tradition accompanied it.

One line, said three ways

One old manual for this training is the Rigveda Pratisakhya, a handbook of the sound rules of the Rigveda text, which opens by naming Shaunaka as the teacher who states the nature of the verses. Mangal Deva Shastri’s English translation (Lahore, 1937) shows how the modes were described. The continuous text is the samhita and the word-by-word text is the pada. Chapters 10 and 11 deal with a third form, the krama. The translation’s Appendix III also compares the manual’s rules with those of Panini’s grammar.

The rule in chapter 10 is mechanical, and chapter 11 gives the krama as reciting the pada form and the samhita form of two words together. Start with two words, repeat the second, join it to the next word, and so continue to the end of the half-verse. For words a, b, c and d, the chain runs a b, b c, c d. The Pratisakhya also records an argument that the krama is useless to anyone who already knows the pada and samhita texts, and it gives six reasons why it is not. One is that the two-word chain shows the combination and the accent of each pair. The text credits the krama’s first teaching to a son of Babhru.

Training in Kerala, as one scholar recorded it

Natalia Korneeva, an independent scholar, described the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala in the IIAS Newsletter of Autumn 2014, after a visit that followed the 6th International Vedic Workshop in Kozhikode in January 2014. The Rigveda tradition there has two schools. The training house at Thrissur was still active, with boys beginning at seven or eight. They spend four years on the continuous text, studying from early morning until evening. Then they add the pada text, the krama text and the higher modes practised in Kerala, called jata and ratha, which take another 12 to 15 years.

For the first six months the teacher teaches accents by moving the pupil’s head with his right hand: straight for the raised accent, down for the unaccented syllable before it, right for the syllable after the raised one, and left for a fourth accent called pracaya. Hand gestures replace the head movements later. Korneeva puts the load at more than 10,500 mantras with their accents. Nambudiris also divide the Rigveda into eight ashtakas, each with adhyayas and vargas, for memory work. In an exercise called varam, one reciter picks a passage by touching stones and another recites it, and contests such as the Kadavallur Anyonyam in Thrissur district test the same skill. She quotes Frits Staal on the purpose: without the recitation, “scholars of the Vedas would have nothing to be scholars of.”

What is still at risk

UNESCO’s chanting entry says only thirteen of the more than one thousand Vedic recitation branches have survived, and that four noted schools, in Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka and Odisha (spelled Orissa in the text), are considered under imminent threat. Korneeva reported in 2014 that only four elderly Nambudiris from two families could chant all the modes of the Kerala Samaveda, and that Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit in Kalady had made 95 hours of audio and video recordings of it.

For the manuscripts, the form lists the birch-bark copy’s brittleness and worn folio edges, the limits of a charitable trust’s funds, and a past threat of vandalism against the institute, which it attributes to some political organisations. It describes the response: a Manuscript Conservation Centre funded by the National Mission for Manuscripts, soft tissue between the birch-bark folios, paper copies wrapped in red cotton cloth and stood upright in old Burma teak cupboards in a hall of dressed stone. When the Rajya Sabha was told of the registration on 28 February 2008, the written reply described the same arrangement of teak cupboards, tissue between folios and red cloth wrapping.