Vedic ritual as medium in ancient and pre-colonial South Asia: its expansion and survival between orality and writing

The earliest more or less datable events in South Asia’s cultural history, the deathof the Buddha and the composition of Pāṇini’s grammar – respectively five andfour centuries before the beginning of the common era – antedate with one to twocenturies the start of a slow and hesitant shift from orality to the writtentransmission of sacred and literary texts in South Asia. With regard to Vedic textswe have, moreover, clear indications that their transmittors avoided and evadedtheir transferral to a written form for a very long time, whereas Buddhistscriptures, for instance, were transferred from purely oral to mainly writtentransmission much earlier. We are therefore confronted with a tradition of Vedictexts stretching over at least two to three millennia, out of which only the last fewcenturies show a tangible text transmission in written form, usually parallel with agradually weakening oral and ritual tradition that to varying degrees takesoccasional or even systematic support from by that time available written sources.Since directly datable written sources are not available before kings startto record their opposition to or support of Vedic ritual in inscriptions (from kingAśoka in the third century B.C.E. onwards) and since an oral tradition that is notembedded in a very strong ritual context is extremely fluid, we have to study theproperties of another medium, next to oral sources and written sources in theform of inscriptions and manuscripts, if we would like to trace the Vedic Aryansin the Indian subcontinent. This other medium is ritual.In the present paper the focus is not so much on the messages transmittedthrough Vedic ritual but rather on its intrinsic properties and chronological andgeographical parameters. Just as the television appeared at a certain point in thehistory of humanity, had to compete first with other media like print and theradio, and after a period of expansion again with other media such as thecomputer that restrict its niche in the domains where it had initially expanded,like that Vedic ritual appeared at a certain point in South Asian cultural history, itmay have had to compete with other media and especially with other ritualsystems of which we know very little, and it later on saw its niche severelyrestricted in domains where it had initially expanded when new media, such as thetransmission of ideas through written and later printed texts, became important.halshs-00673190,version1-23Feb2012