Early Vedic Poetry in India

Clouds, related to the concept of 'Atmospheric light' in Rigveda

I am a resident of West Bengal, India, which is often considered a very poetic culture. So far as the poetic part is concerned, Bengal, and India in the larger sense, has a lot to contribute. But unfortunately, most of the poems of Indian origin have not been successfully translated into English or other western languages.

What exactly is poetry? It's very difficult to summarise its meaning or definition and wrap it up within a single sentence, without producing and expecting much opposition, but I believe poetry can be called, traditionally, the 'spontaneous expression of our inner thoughts, our inner self in the form of words'. Thus, logically and in a crisp manner, poetry is the art of relating our thoughts and feelings to human-readable words.
 

Rainclouds have often been described as Parjanya

But so much has been done in this beautiful art of relating words with thoughts, that a vast compendium of different branches, variations etc. of poetry actually emerged out of some very primitive techniques. With the evolution of human intellect, as men began to understand better, poetry also evolved. It acquired depth by its own right, gave rise to its own alternate forms, and certainly added to the satisfaction of human mind. I call myself a novice poet, or at least I pretend to be, and at the very least, I am an avid reader when it comes to poems, from the languages I know, such as English, German, Bengali, Sanskrit and Hindi.


So much has been said and written down about western, especially English poetry, that there's little water I can think of adding to the vast ocean of literature. So instead, I make my aim here to try my best to attempt to mirror the growth of Indian poetry, since the ancient times. The art of writing poems in India is very, very old, and started about the same time with Greek poetry. The first poems were praises, hymns sung in praise of personified natural forces, the deities, or 'Devas' and 'Devis', the shinning entities who symbolised the very fabrics of natural elements. The earliest instance of poetry can be called Rigveda, perhaps. It is one of the four Vedas, or sacred texts of the Indo-Aryan civilisation, of proto-Hinduism. In them, we find poetic creations, as the sages sing libations to Agni, Indra, Maruts, Apam Napat, Rudra, Visnu, Varuna, Mitra, etc. and Goddesses like Ushas, Aranyani, Aditi, Indrani etc. The very first hymn of the first hymn of Rigveda, Mandala 1:1, is poetic in nature and reflects the inner thoughts of the author.

Agni, the Fire God

It says "O Agni, thou minister and governor of sacrifice, Thou giver of wealth resplendent, mayest thou reside in thy above, grow with each day and dispel our fears. O thee, dispeller of the darkness of night, all-knower, mayest thee be easy of approach to us all, as is the father to his son, O guard of the law eternal!".


The above is not an exact literary translation of Rigveda, but it certainly is a summary of how the Aryo-Vedic thinkers used to relate their understanding of religion and nature to their words.

With Samaveda, the third Veda in the order, we find some very early attempts to generate songs from poetry. Basically, what the secondary objective of such religious poems and myths was, actually to imbue in the minds of the simple-minded people a sense of contentment, a sense of hope, and to paint a picture of the truth behind nature and natural forces.


For example, as the Sun rises, the poet of Rigveda describes the veil of night being lifted slowly by the glory and resplendence of beauty of Goddess Ushas, the bright-eyed celestial maiden, the daughter of the heavens, sister to the Gods. Thus, dawn is being poetically described in the form of a maiden, indescribably beautiful, with fairest complexion, sister to night, who rides the chariot of light and is drawn across the sky by her noble steed. In her might, by her glory, she 'awakens the sleeping heart', and 'gives strength to the sleeping beings, makes them ready for work'. She is said to guide Surya, Aryan Sun God.


What especially strikes me in this regard is the poetic description of dew. In some places of Rigveda, Ushas is said to have just bathed, in the celestial streams. And droplets of milky water from that celestial stream are named the mist and dew.


So beautiful is the language of the Vedas, that atheists and agnostics too, in my opinion, read them, just for the sake of understanding their poetic nature.

In the Rigvedic hymn 10:90, we find the description of Purusha, the cosmic man, the personification of early cosmos as the Platonic God, or early divine being, the source of all. We find beautiful lines such as:


"From thy mind born was the Moon,
Thy eyes are the powerful Sun,
From thy mouth emerged Lightning and Fire,
And Wind is the breath of thy life,
From thy navel was born the outer space,
And thy forehead gave birth to equanimity"

Aranyani, the Forest Goddess

How beautiful and how glorious, is the hymn! It serves as one of the examples of early Indo-Aryan poetry, an attempt to know the unknown, to try to understand the apparent divinity behind the curtain of nature! Yet another example, and in my opinion the best one, is the hymn to the Forest Goddess, Aranyani, Rigveda 10:146:1-12. We find her being personified as a tireless Goddess of glorious beauty, mother of all things sylvan. The play, apparent illusions created by light and darkness in the depth of forests has been described too. I sometimes wonder, how beautiful can just 12 such lines be!


As we progress more into the Rigveda, we find more and more such examples, each appearing more beautiful than the previous one. Of course later, many other Indo-European religions gave rise to similar thoughts and concepts, such hymns and songs of praise, such as the songs of Scalds and Eddas in case of Norsemen, but nowhere do we find such elegant volume of ten books, the ten Mandalas of Rigveda, organised in such an elegant manner, adding a key-number to each single line, each single hymn.

The Creation Hymnis yet another beautiful expression of doubts, regarding the formation of the cosmos. Especially in the tenth Mandala, we find many such examples.


These examples motivated many similar works in both near and far future. The works of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, of Rabindranath Tagore, are often found to have been inspired by the beauty of the Veda. Thus, we should be eternally grateful to mankind in general, for having created the art of poetry in different cultures, across all boundaries, in all countries. Every poem is beautiful in its own way, and I believe poetry shall be there to accompany us all, till the end of time.