Abstract
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts. This article attempts to theorize how one might construct an alternative to modern conceptualizations of “the poem” that more closely appropriates the conceptualization of textuality in the Rigveda, an anthology of 1028 sūktas “well-spoken (texts)” that represents the oldest religious literature in South Asia. In order to understand what these texts are and what they were expected to do, this article examines the techniques by which the Rigveda refers to itself, to its performer, to its audience, and to the occasion of its performance. In so doing, this article theorizes a “performance grammar” comprising three axes of textual self-reference (spatial, temporal, and personal); these axes of reference constitute a scene of performance populated by rhetorically constructed speakers and listeners. This performance narrative, called here the adhiyajña level, frames the mythological narratives of the text. By examining the relationship between mythological narrative and performance narrative, we can better understand the purpose of performing a text and thus what kind of an entity Rigvedic “texts” really are. While this article proposes a rubric specifically for the Rigvedic context, its principles can be adapted to other premodern texts in order to better understand the performance context they presuppose.
Highlights
Preliminary RemarksBeyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms, Jacqueline Vayntrub argues that the modern categories of poetry and prose have anachronistically imposed themselves on scholars’
Recent scholarship has challenged the anachronistic projection of the modern category of the poem onto premodern texts
Its principles can be adapted to other premodern texts in order to better understand the performance context they presuppose
Summary
Beyond Orality: Biblical Poetry on Its Own Terms, Jacqueline Vayntrub argues that the modern categories of poetry and prose have anachronistically imposed themselves on scholars’. Vayntrub interrogates the categories of verbal art native to the texts themselves, in particular the term mashal, frequently translated as “proverb”, is perhaps better thought of as “a speech act.” This is not because of any intrinsically oral character, but because that is how the Hebrew Bible frames the text by situating it in a time and place and attributing it to a speaker. As the yajña is the performative context presupposed by the Vedas , I think it is appropriate to use this term, adhiyajña, to refer to the bundle of strategies by which Vedic texts refer to their own textuality, because it is at the yajña that that textuality would have been experienced directly, because it is there that it would have been audible. We want to understand how the Rigveda represents performance in order to understand how its notion of textuality shapes its literary contents
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