The Vedas and Upanishads for Children (eBook)

NATURE SONGS OF THE CATTLE-HERDERS

A brief introduction to the composers of India’s all-time greatest hits

Surprising as it may seem to us today, the Vedas, which are the oldest and among the most beautiful hymns to the nature gods that we have, did not come to us from a society of scholars who had read fat books, maxed their exams, or graduated from universities. They came instead from simple people who lived close to the land, slept under the stars, and had a close connection with their horses and dogs, and the sheep, goats and cattle that they herded.

Who exactly were these people? Where did they come from? No one is hundred per cent sure – after all, we’re talking about people who lived 3,500 years ago. What’s more, these people did not believe in permanence – they did not write things down, draw pictures on rocks for us to puzzle over thousands of years later, or build anything that would last a century, leave alone millennia. They only left us their words, thousands and thousands of them, and their thoughts – about how the universe worked and what the purpose of human life was and why we should not be afraid of death. And they made pretty darn sure that we would get to hear all those words and all those thoughts (well, a LOT of them, anyway) long after they had composed them, by not putting them down on perishable material like paper or bark or cloth; instead, they put them in the best safekeeping boxes in the world – people’s memories.* All we know, or think we know, about these people comes from analyzing these words and thoughts.

And what have we figured out so far? There are conflicting theories, but one of the most popular ones over the last few decades is that these people were horse-riding tribes of nomadic goatherds and cattle-herders from Central Asia (the area roughly occupied by today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) who found their way to India (specifically the Punjab and its surrounds) around 1500 bce. In their literature, these tribes referred to themselves as Arya (say aar-ya) – ‘the noble ones’.

Experts who lean towards this theory believe that the reason that Arya tribes left Central Asia was because overgrazing and drought had made their original homelands, the grasslands called the steppes, unlivable for themselves and their animals. To ensure less crowding and better opportunities for all in their search for new pastures, they say, the Arya split up. One branch went east towards Mongolia, one west towards Anatolia (Turkey) and one south towards Bactria (the area north of the Hindu Kush mountains). From Bactria, the Arya divided again, one branch moving west towards Iran, and the other east towards India. This second branch – whose people these experts refer to as the Indo-Aryans or the Indo-Iranians – settled first in the Punjab and later in the Gangetic plains.

The timing of the grand entrance of these mystery people – the Arya – onto the Indian history stage is crucial. We first encounter them around the same time that the people of the Harappan Civilization – who had lived and thrived on the banks of the Indus and her tributaries in the Punjab for over a thousand years – abandoned their vast, flourishing cities and mysteriously disappeared. (Want to know a little more about the Harappans? Check out ‘Pashupati’s People’ on page 54.)

This little detail leads to the other popular theory, this one more recent, about the origin of the Arya. What if the chariot-driving, horse-riding, dog-loving, weapon-wielding Arya were not foreigners at all, but Harappans themselves who had quit their riverside cities after a great flood and spread out across northern India and further west and east, to re-emerge centuries later as the composers of the Vedas? Or what if they were an entirely different indigenous set of Indian people?

Let us leave that question to the scholars and academics to wrangle over. What is not disputed is that it was the Arya who introduced the Iron Age into India (the Harappans had only known the use of the softer bronze and copper) and that it was also they who gave India and the world the oldest of the languages in the Indo-European family of languages, the perfectly formed ‘mother language’ Sanskrit. (That isn’t an exaggeration, by the way; the anglicized name for the language – Sanskrit – actually comes from the words ‘samskruta’, which literally means ‘perfectly formed’! In fact, in the beginning, ‘samskruta’ was the adjective used to describe the language of the ancient texts – the language itself was simply called ‘bhasha’, or language. So ‘samskruta bhasha’ simply meant ‘the perfectly formed language’.)

As the pastures in the north-west were consumed and the rivers that sustained their crops changed course or dried up because of changes in climate, the Arya, having now split into five main tribes, began to move slowly east across northern India. Over the next thousand years, they colonized the Doab – the fertile land between the two great rivers Ganga and Yamuna – and became farmers. Each Arya tribe split into clans as they went along, fighting each other to establish their own little areas of control, called janapadas. By the 6th century bce, the many little janapadas had been consolidated into sixteen larger ‘kingdoms’ called mahajanapadas, which stretched between the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhyas in the south, and from the western (Arabian) sea to the eastern sea (the Bay of Bengal). The Arya referred to their new land as Aryavarta (say aar-yaa-varta) – Abode of the Noble Ones.

One of the mahajanapadas was Kuru (does that name ring a bell?), which, the Mahabharata tells us, was the land of the... yup, the Pandavas and the Kauravas! Another was faraway Gandhara, in today’s Afghanistan, from where the beautiful princess Gandhari was brought to Kuru as the bride of the blind prince Dhritarashtra. A third was Kosala, the kingdom of the Ikshvakus, whose most famous king was... right, Rama from the Ramayana! There was also the mahajanapada of Magadha, from where Ashoka Maurya and the Guptas ruled, and that of Kashi, with its holy cities of Varanasi (revered as a pilgrimage centre for thousands of years) and Sarnath (where Buddha gave his first sermon).*

But back to the Arya. The Arya tended not to stay in the same place for too long, at least in the beginning. Their on-the-go lifestyle made it somewhat pointless for them to build great cities or temples or palaces, and it seems they truly did not care for such things.** After all, the scholarly ones among them carried all they needed to know in their heads, and as for the others, their greatest wealth – horses and cattle – were fully capable of moving with them.

What the Arya did care about, however, was pleasing their gods. Like all other early agrarian civilizations, they lived equally in awe of the formidable power and beauty of Mother Nature, and fear at her capriciousness. Naturally, just like the Egyptians, Chinese and Mesopotamians, they turned the elements – the sun, the earth, the rain, the rivers, the dawn, the thunder – into gods, and set about composing extravagant hymns of praise to each one. After all, if the gods were not kept happy, how could the Arya hope to ensure that the rain fell at the right time and the rivers did not flood (or dry up!) and the sun shone just so and the earth gave forth enough of herself to sustain their crops, their animals and themselves? (Who were the gods of the Arya? Are they the same gods Hindus worship today? Find out in...