Becoming Sanskrit. A study of language and person in the Ṛgvedic Āraṇyakas

Abstract

In recent years, the topic of Sanskrit’s cultural significance has become increasingly subject to discussion as its high visibility in the identity politics of the modern Indian nation has combined with a general questioning of philological methods to generate a demand for revised approaches to historiography and textual analysis. The resulting developments successfully demonstrate the potential of retrieving a wide diversity of previously unsought information from Sanskrit texts, utilising these findings to grapple with the identification of the language with closed models of cultural elitism, and thereby establish the foundation of a wider understanding of Sanskrit in historical context. What these developments do not address, however, is the matter of how the composition and reception of linguistic materials are influenced by culturally specific understandings of language that are not universally applicable across cultures, and may indeed be incompatible with those familiar to modern scholars and around which a number of leading hermeneutic approaches have been built. This work argues, firstly, that the parameters currently ascribed to Sanskrit – the justifications of its specialised status, the focus on structure and style in definitions of genre, the treatment of revelation as static and non-subjective – are markedly narrower than those demonstrated in Vedic texts, and as such obscure the possibility of alternative phenomenological, language-based and non-elite explanations for Sanskrit’s ongoing appeal in South Asian religious culture. Secondly, it contends that understandings of language, ancient and modern alike, implicate deeply embedded conceptions of the relationship between language and the human subject, particularly as relates to the formation and refinement of personal identity – a matter which draws revelation and embodiment together in the provision of a living context for self-transformation. These two considerations will be explored through a close examination of the Ṛgvedic Āraṇyakas, since they provide an exemplary instance of the way that familiar approaches to Sanskrit must be adapted in accordance with the demands of texts if we are to retrieve their internal integrity and thereby reach a deeper understanding of what it means to become saṃskṛta.