Invited review presented at International Astronomical Union /UNESCO Symposium 260 : The Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture, UNESCO Paris, 19-23 January 2009.

 

 

Rajesh Kochhar

CSIR Emeritus Scientist, IISER:

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research,

Sector 26, Chandigarh 160019, India

rkochhar2000@gmail.com

 

Indian astronomical tradition has been characterized by antiquity, continuity and interaction with the outside world. Here we focus on some selected aspects of astronomy-culture interactions;

 

         How knowledge about astronomical universe was  used to regulate human conduct in the joint Indo-Iranian tradition.

         How the religious and the ritualistic tradition influenced the astronomical pursuits.

         How astronomical knowledge in turn modified the extant mythology.

         We also raise an important general question : when  and how does tradition gets frozen and emerge as touch-me-not

 

Human beings are born astronomers. Ever since they learnt to walk upright they have looked at the sky and wondered. The sky has remained the same but not its meaning.

 

We can distinguish between three phases in the history of humankind’s relationship with its cosmic environment: (i) propitiatory phase; (ii) negotiatory phase; and the current (iii) expository phase (this probably needs a better name). Each of these phases leads to and coexists with the next. 

To begin with, sky was home to divinities who were to be feared and propitiated. As time progressed, human beings felt more secure and became intellectually more alert. Earlier awe made way for curiosity.  Skies were now scanned for discovering patterns in the behaviour of the divinities. The knowledge so gained   was put to practical use and employed to establish a negotiatory relationship with the celestial bodies. 

The third phase ,  properly speaking, began exactly four centuries ago with Galileo. The cosmic environment was now be subjected to scientific scrutiny with a view to discovering and testing laws of nature. Earlier astronomy had measured angles; now it could talk of distances.  The sky now acquired depth literally as well as figuratively. 

There is an interesting correlation between the world geopolitics and our view of the cosmos, which does not seem to have been noticed before. For a very long time, the model universe had a centre. The pride of place first belonged to the earth and then to the sun. Even when galaxies were discovered our Galaxy was believed to be the largest. It is in relatively recent times, in the post- World War II era, that the universe has truly become egalitarian. Interestingly, this cosmic scheme has been mimicked on the earth as well. When the universe was centric, the earth, or parts thereof, also had a power centre, be it local or on a larger scale. 

The Copernican principle now applies, at least in principle, on  the earth as well.  Is this a coincidence?  Or is it  that our perception of the cosmos influences the scheme of things on the earth   just as this perception itself is fashioned by the situation on earth? 

My concern today is to discuss the interplay between astronomy and culture in general in the Indian context. Much of the discussion belongs to the negotiatory phase described above.  I have advisedly used culture in the plural in the title. This is not so much to describe the scope of this review as to draw attention to its limitations.

 

For a number of reasons, discussed in a different context elsewhere, most of the world attention on India’s past has focused on Sanskrit texts and the associated culture (Kochhar 2008a; Kochhar 2008b).

 We have no clues whatever to the astronomical knowledge prevalent during the various phases of the  vast Harappan archaeological tradition the roots of which go back to the very beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry in what is now Baluchistan (Kochhar2000). Also the astronomical knowledge residing in the fields rather than in the archives  and especially belonging to communities officially termed scheduled tribes needs to be examined in depth. New scholarship must go beyond the Sanskrit India. 

Source material

A discussion that involves ancient India must take note of the nature and limitations of the source material available. Scripts (Kharoshthi, Brahmi) were introduced into India about 3rd century BCE or some what earlier for writing Prakrit languages derived from Sanskrit.  Script for Sanskrit itself, the language of Hindu scriptures, was adopted much later.  Writing material came from plants or trees and had a short life. Paper was not introduced into India till about 8^th century CE. The Vedic texts were in any case forbidden to be written.  

Ancient Indian intellectual tradition has been oral. Texts were in the custody of specialist caste groups who memorized them and transmitted them to the next generation by word of mouth. The extant texts would have been supplemented with explanatory “notes” to serve an immediate purpose. What was not considered worth preserving was lost for ever. Also, it is not possible to assign firm dates to any early event or development. It is therefore not possible to construct a connected account about any aspect of early India. 

We must cull relevant information from a variety of literary sources. Sanskrit provides texts at three levels. (i) The most important of these is the Vedic corpus, comprising priestly books composed by a large number of authors over a long period of time, which could be as much as two thousand years, say from 1700 BCE to zero CE (Kochhar 2000).The importance of the Vedic texts lies in the fact that scrupulous care was taken to preserve them in their original form. They are thus truly representative of the time of their composition even if that time is largely indeterminable.

 

The pride of place in the Vedic corpus goes to the oldest and the stand-alone text, Rigveda, containing about ten thousand stanzas. According to Kochhar (2000) it was composed over a period extending say from 1700BCE to 900BCE, although its earliest portions probably contain memories of still earlier time. (Some other texts, though closed later, may contain much  older matter. ) 

There are a few stray astronomical references in the Rigveda, but for our purposes the more useful is the Yajurveda which is a manual for actual performance of ritual. It contains some observational material, such as bright  stars visible on the journey of the moon ( the nakshatras)  as also reference to  the colures.

 

There is a solitary Vedic text, Vedanga Jyotisha, devoted exclusively to astronomy. It is the least understood of the whole corpus, partly because it was overtaken by developments. The oldest portions could be as old as 1400 BCE. Interestingly it deals only with the movements of the sun and the moon. Zodiacal signs and week days and other pre-Ptolemy elements would be introduced into India about 100 BCE, as part of interaction with the post-Alexandrian Greco-Babylonian world; see below. (Western scholarship especially during the colonial period tended to deny antiquity or originality to ancient India. As a backlash, many researchers have tended  to    unduly stretch  the chronology backwards.)

 The Vedic texts constitute the heritage of Hinduism. The youngest texts, like Manava Dharma Shastra, or Manu Smriti, which could be as recent as zero CE plus minus, represent transition to Hinduism proper. 

(ii) The texts associated with Hinduism as practiced are the Puranas and the two epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. They were narrated to the public at large and used to be recast to suit the prevailing requirements of the narrators as well as the listeners.  Interestingly only additions were made, no deletions. 

(iii) In addition there are scientific corpus dealing with astronomy ( as also with health care, that is Ayurveda) which  underwent deletion as well as addition.

 

So far we have listed sources in Sanskrit ( the term is used loosely to include pre-Sanskrit). (iv)  In addition valuable information comes from Buddhist and Jain sources. The former include material from outside India. 

 

Cosmic order and human ethics 

The eternity around us has stood in sharp contrast to the short time-span of the human beings themselves. This chasm has been sought to be bridged by denying death finality. The “burial cultures” have postulated the physical rising of the dead, while the “cremation cultures” have distinguished between the body and the soul, and spoken of the indestructibility of the latter. 

There is a beautiful concept linking the divine with the human that goes back to the joint Indo-Iranian times. Called rta in the Rgveda and arta (or asa) in the Avesta, it refers to the cosmic order, not in the sense of impersonal laws of nature as ascertained from the outside, but as an example of righteous cosmic conduct which the humans should emulate. 

The sun, moon and other geocentric planets dutifully and predictably orbit around the earth. (Their predictability was a source of comfort, in contrast to the  sudden ill-omened appearance of comets, meteors, etc.) The laws regulating the behaviour of these divinities are inbuilt into the system. But similar regulation of human conduct can come only from an explicit prescription of a code of ethical conduct. Emphasis on rta / arta is far more pronounced in the Avesta than Rigveda. 

To bring the terrestrial and the celestial closer together the Vedic people assigned the attributes of one to the other. Planets return to their place in the sky; so do seasons on the earth. But human beings are born and die. In analogy with the planets, human beings should also have continuity. To achieve this, the concept of reincarnation was introduced. But in a certain sense planets are condemned to a life of incessant motion. An endless cycle of birth and death would be a punishment rather than a boon. Therefore the concept of what we may call truncated eternity was introduced, under the name moksha or nirvana, whereby a soul is liberated from the constraints of future birth. 

The cyclic time

Far more important were the human attributes assigned to the gods. The concept of age, birth and death was introduced for the cosmos as a whole, and a cosmic chronology in the form of the yuga system was constructed by suitably scaling up the human calendar. The eternity of the planetary orbits was generalized to set up an oscillating universe without beginning or end.  

For the mathematically oriented brave hearts, the technical details are explained in Appendix I. Here we may notice some important features of the scheme.  

In the Vedic period, a year was taken to comprise 12 months and 360 days. Multiply these two numbers to get 360×12=4320. Now, suffix this number with the requisite number of zeroes to produce long structured time-spans. The basic unit is a mahayuga (mega-age): 

              1   mahayuga=4.32 million years.

 

A still bigger time-span, Brahma’s “twelve-hour” day (or night), or a kalpa, is defined as equal to 1000 mahayugas:

 

1  Brahma’s day=4.32 billion years. 

Ancient Indians were probably the only people talking of such large numbers and of the endlessness of the universe. These numbers have been noticed by modern cosmologists in their textbooks as the cosmological timescales indeed turn out to be of the order of billions of years. 

A maha-yuga, in turn, is composed of four ages or yugas :  Satya or Krta;  Treta;   Dvapara; and   Kali. The scheme has some interesting attributes: 

ü                Virtue decreases down the ages in the ratio 4:3:2:1.

ü                Duration of the individual ages also decreases in the same ratio.

ü                Kaliyuga is thus the shortest.

ü                We are currently in the kaliyuga. 

The scheme must have  been found very attractive because it was used in entirely different contexts with the same terminology. These long ages were employed in astronomy. The terminology of the four yugas was also employed by the Puranas to periodize   political history going back about 100 generations. This has caused much contemporary confusion.

          The scheme was formulated in the kaliyuga itself. It is significant that the present age was postulated to be the kaliyuga. We are now in the worst of times. Things can only improve. Imagine, if we had been placed in any of the earlier yugas, things would have had to deteriorate further before they could improve. It is thus an inherently optimistic scheme. During the movement against the British rule in India, the dark kaliyuga’a making way for satyayuga was repeatedly  invoked  to enhance nationalist consciousness. 

 A pioneering name in the  systematization of the post-Vedic astronomy  was Aryabhata (b. 476 CE). Indian mathematical astronomy , which we may call Siddhantic (since the astronomical texts were called Siddhanta, proven in the end), focused on calculating geo-centric planetary orbits and especially the lunar and solar eclipses. 

From 6^th century CE till Kepler’s time , Indian astronomers were probably the only ones who could calculate eclipses with any degree of accuracy. The unbroken tradition was alive till as recently as 19^th century. A Tamil astronomer computed for John Warren , a French astronomer in the service of British East India Company, the lunar eclipse of 1825 May 31-June 1 with an error of +4 minutes for the beginning,-23 minutes for the middle, and -52 minutes for the end ( Neugebauer 1983:435).

 

An Indian astronomer adjusted his parameters and obtained satisfactory match between the calculated sky and the actual sky. This match  would  disappear in a few centuries. A brilliant astronomer then appeared on the scene ,  and reworked the mathematics. Remarkably although the physical  goal was the same different astronomers ended up setting up and solving different equations. Mathematics was a tool for planetary calculations. There are very few full-time mathematicians in the Indian tradition ( Kochhar 1993). 

Sacred texts influence science

Use of early astronomical data in the ritual profoundly influenced the later course of astronomical developments. The yuga system with its nomenclature was borrowed by the astronomers. Thus the Surya Siddhanta would say that there were 146,568 revolutions of Saturn in a mahayuga, implying an orbital period of 29.4743 years. 

Interestingly,  at places Aryabhata   chose to  deviate from the Vedic yuga scheme. He split a mahayuga into four equal parts. Also , he  set his kalpa equal to 1008 mahayugas (instead of the Vedic 1000). Since 1008 is divisible by seven, all  kalpas,  each 4.32 billion years apart   will begin on the same day of the week. Some far sight indeed ! 

Like the  (( divine) Rigveda  astronomical texts were composed in verse, so that an astronomer had to be a Sanskrit poet first. Constraints of metre forced astronomers to use synonyms and take recourse to allusions. This introduced ambiguity at places. More importantly only   conclusions were preserved  and not the arguments leading to them. Generally speaking there was a tendency to present astronomical results as revealed knowledge rather than deduced.

 

Aryabhata believed in the spin of the earth and said so in his work.  This however never became a part of the mainstream. He was severally criticized for this by his “adversaries”. Even later astronomers belonging to his  own school felt so embarrassed that they tried to change a  word here and there in his work to convey the impression that the great master like everybody else took the earth  to be non-spinning.  Today we give great credit to Aryabhata for his belief in earth’s spin. But it is important to keep in mind that our source of knowledge is his critics who were putting Aryabhata’s lapses on record. (As a belated compensation Aryabhata’s glorifiers now falsely credit him with belief in heliocentrism.)

 As an analogy, we may note that we know about the deeds of  revolutionaries  fighting for India’s freedom from the charge sheets filed against them by the colonial government. 

If astronomy had followed a prose tradition (as was the case with post-Vedic Upanishads) some later scholars could have revived and expanded on Aryabhata’s hypothesis. 

Indian astronomers were not aware of the precession of equinoxes. A creative astronomer would adjust his parameters so that his computed planetary orbits matched the observations. With the passage of time the  computed sky would differ from the actual. This ar necessitated the arrival of  a new mathematician – astronomer on the scene.

 Ancient India astronomical effort was society oriented rather than sky oriented. Its aim was to prepare almanacs pinpointing auspicious times for social and religious purposes. It is certain that most if not all students who learnt astronomy did so to become practising astrologers. 

The ancient astronomical texts were unambiguously attributed to their named authors. But at the same time their contents were incorporated into traditionally-named texts that were passed off as having been revealed to the chosen ones (e.g. Surya Siddhanta). This pretension to divine connection no doubt increased the astrological market value                                                                                                                                                                                                  of the texts and ensured funding of astronomical activity by the society. 

(It is noteworthy that Buddha was against astrology. As long as Buddhism held sway astronomy went in decline. It is only on resurgence of Hinduism that astronomy revived. By the time Buddhism was exported, astrology had become part of it.) 

Aryabhata’s influential and pioneering work  closes with the stanza : “This work , Aryabhatiya by name,is the same as  the ancient Swayambhuva [i.e. revealed by Swayambh] and as such it is true for all times. One who imitates it or finds fault with it shall lose his  good deeds and longevity “. It has been argued-and with justification-that a man of  Aryabhata’s   known scientific approach could not have made such a pompous and intimidating statement. While this argument exonerates Aryabhata, it does indict his                           later-day followers , and tells us about the  atmosphere in which such a statement could be made and attributed to Aryabhata himself (Kochhar 1993).

 

Old astronomical knowledge  has remained a living tradition even if its role is not so obvious now. Spring and autumn equinoxes as well as winter solstice ( but not the summer solstice) are still celebrated as religious festivals. (Thus  spring and autumn equinoxes are honoured by nine-day celebration each, called navaratri. Makar samkranti, the sun’s ingress into Capricorn , on about 14 January,  is nominally celebrated as northward turning of the sun . Jupiter’s 12-year orbital period is commemorated by the Kumbh festival, marking Jupiter’s computed ingress into Aquarius.) 

Traditional  almanacs in  current use still use old prescriptions. They have accumulated an error of 23 days due to precession of equinoxes, but nobody seems to mind. The reason is that phenomena like ingress into a zodiacal sign are not visible to the eye. Since eclipses can be timed now with great accuracy, their computation is  not done traditionally but    on the basis of modern algorithms. 

Much of the contemporary interest still centres on the astrological universe.( Use of high technology as represented by the computers  along with the  insecurities  introduced by globalization  seems to have  lent new legitimacy  to astrology.)  The  interest in  the  progress since, for some reason,   extends only to black holes and the origin of the universe. This is probably so because here the difference between the layperson and the expert gets blurred. All  astronomical developments in between  commonly leave the laypersons rather unenthused.

 

Science modifies sacred texts

We have  already seen how astronomical tradition was influenced by the Vedic. But  the traffic was two-way. Early  Vedic mythology attributed the eclipses to a demon Rahu, who is explicitly named in  Atharvaveda. Chhandogya Upanishad declares that a  soul which has  acquired pure knowledge is liberated  from the body   like the moon becoming free from Rahu. ( Kane V.1: 569) The correct mathematical theory of eclipses, which probably made its appearance in India about 100 BCE or so , points out that for an eclipse to occur the moon should be at one of its nodes, that is, at one of the two points where the lunar orbit intersects the ecliptic. The term Rahu was borrowed from the Vedic texts and applied to the lunar node, especially the ascending node (when the moon crossed the ecliptic moving northwards). The other node was termed Ketu. Maitrayani Upanishad mentions both Rahu and Ketu ( Kane  V.1:569). Incidentally this also tells us that the  Vedantic part of the  corpus was still open say about zero CE. 

At a more popular level  an elaborate  mythology was created to cut the old single demon Rahu  into two . The head retained the old name  while the  torso  was called Ketu. Subsequently the concept of Rahu and Ketu travelled outside India also. Burma knew of Rahu as Yahu ( Kochhar 1990) Interestingly,  in China while Rahu stood for the ascending node, Ketu denoted the lunar apogee, an identification not known in India.

 It is noteworthy that no religious, spiritual or revealed text or folklore has ever contradicted what the people at the time accepted as scientific knowledge. There is a basic difference between scientific tradition and the  other societal traditions. Science is inherently progressive. It continually updates itself.  There is no concept of frozenness associated with it.  On the other hand  the textual content of sacred tradition or folklore remains open for a while during which it takes note of contemporaneous scientific developments. But then it  becomes static and at times even may see later scientific developments antagonistically. (Hindu society has tended to accept modern scientific discoveries through the side door, by pretending that they were known to the ancient scriptures!) 

Appendix 1: Creation chronology 

The Rgveda uses yuga in the sense of a time-span, an age, or a generation. Vedanga Jyotisha refers to a five-year yuga. Atharvaveda  mentions in order 100 years, 1000 years, ayuta (10,000 years) and then two, three or four yugas. This suggests that a yuga here means an ayuta. The yuga-system as now commonly understood is set forth in the relatively late Vedic text Manusmrti (1.68-1.86), and expanded in the various Puranas.

 

In the Vedic times, a year comprised 12 months and 360 days. A human year was set equal to a day of the gods, so that a divine year (Dyr) would consist of 360 human years (yr).The divine year in turn was used to construct an elaborate chronology.

 

A mahayuga or chaturyuga (great age or four-age) was postulated as made up of four sub-ages or yugas: kaliyuga, dvaparayuga, tretayuga and krtayuga, with lengths in the ratio 1:2:3:4. The names are significant. The two middle ones obviously refer to the second and the third. The names of the two end yugas are taken from the game of dice, kali referring to one, and krta to four. The numbering is thus backwards, kaliyuga being the shortest and the latest.

 

It will be convenient to use mathematical notation to properly understand the formulation of the yuga system. A kaliyuga is said to contain 1200 Dyr. Let us denote the duration of a kaliyuga by the symbol k and of a mahayuga by m. dvapara, treta and krta are then 2k,3k and 4k respectively, so that

 

m=k+2k+3k+4k=10k.

 

For later reference, let us denote a krtayuga (=4k) by s. Then

 

6m=60k=15s.

 

We now construct a still bigger time-span called kalpa, comprising 1000 mahayugas. To complicate matters, let us introduce structure into a kalpa as follows:

 

1 kalpa 

  

      =1000m

 

      = 994m+6m     

                              

       =14 x 71m+15s   

                              

        =14×71m+14s+s  

                                   

        =s+14(71m+s).

 

Let us call 71m a Manvantara (Manu’s interval) so called because this span is presided over by a ruler designated Manu. (There are thus 14 Manus.) We can now describe a kalpa in words. A kalpa begins with a dawn equal to a krtayuga. This dawn is followed in succession by 14 Manvantaras, at the end of each of which there occurs a deluge (pralaya) lasting a krtayuga. This complex scheme has perplexed many modern-day commentators. Thus, Ebenezer Burgess in his famous 1860 annotated translation of the Surya Siddhanta declared: “Why the factors fourteen and seventy - one were thus used in making up the Aeon [kalpa] is not obvious” (Ebnezer 1860:11). I think this scheme was constructed working backwards from the neat round figure of 1000.

 

To sum up so far, a kalpa comprises 1000 mahayugas, with one mahayuga equaling in length ten kaliyugas. It now remains to give recognizable values to these numbers. A kaliyuga was set equal to 1200 divine years. Recalling that a divine year consists of 360 (human) years, we can express the yugas in human years:

 

      Kaliyuga   =4, 32,000 yr

      Mahayuga=4.32×10⁶ yr

      Kalpa       =4.32×10⁹  yr.

 

Kalpa becomes the basis for constructing a chronology for Brahma, the supreme creator. A kalpa is set equal to Brahma’s day or night. 360 kalpa pairs define Brahma’s year, 100 years making his life-span. Currently, we are in the midst of Brahma’s life. He has completed 50 years of his life. In the current kalpa seven out of the fourteen Manvantara are over, and so on.

 

References

Burgess, Ebenezer (1860) The Surya Siddhanta (reprint; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005)

 

Kane, P.V. (1977) History of Dharmasastra, Vol. V. ( Poona : Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute)

 

Kochhar, R.K. (1990) “Rahu in Burmese tradition (Correspondence) ”. Quart. J. R. Astr. Soc., 31,257

 

Kochhar Rajesh (1993) “ Historical perspective”. In: Astronomy in India : Past, Present and Future ( eds.: Rajesh Kochhar and Jayant Narlikar) ( Pune : IUCAA)

Kochhar, Rajesh (2000) The Vedic People: Their History and Geography (Hyderabad:Orient Longman)

 

Kochhar, Rajesh (2008) “Cultivation of science in the 19^th century Bengal”. Indian Journal of Physics, 82(8), 1003-1082. (Akshoy Datta Memorial Lecture at Indian Association for the Cultivation of  Science, Kolkata.)

 

     Kochhar, Rajesh (2008) “Seductive orientalism: English education and modern science in colonial India”. Social Scientist, 36:45-63. (S.C.  Mishra Lecture at 68^th Indian History Congress,   Delhi.)

 

Mani, Vettam (1975) Puranic Encyclopaedia (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass)

 

Neugebauer, Otto (1983) Astronomy and History: Selected Essays (New York: Springer)//

 

 

	Volume 17 - Issue 25, Dec. 9 - 22, 2000 India’s National Magazine from the publishers of THE HINDU

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BOOKS   Questions about the Aryan identity 200) SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN   The Vedic People, Their History and Geography by Rajesh Kochhar; Orient Longman, Hyderabad, 2000; pages xiv + 259, Rs.425.   “HISTORY cannot be written without implicating the historian,” says Rajesh Kochhar as he begins his journey into the remote past. By any standards, he is an unconventional historian, an astrophysicist who has equipped himself with the tools of diverse di sciplines - ethnography, linguistics, metallurgy, paleobotany, among others - to interpret a period which to this day remains wrapped in mystery. More than the obscurity of the archaeological and scriptural records, the more formidable barriers to unders tanding have been posed by the layers of political partisanship that the study of the Vedas - as historical documents - have acquired over the years. Interpretations of the Vedas have always been closely interwoven with competing views on the construction of the modern Indian state. Theorists of nationhood as a primordial solidarity dating back to antiquity, cite the authority of the Vedas in self-rat ionalisation. In the early days of India’s struggle against colonialism, the liberal sections of the nationalist leadership were torn by a question of priorities: should nationalist consolidation precede or follow social reform? Lala Lajpat Rai, the grea t spokesman of Hindu nationalism, had a simple solution to the conundrum: “Reform is revival and revival is reform”. While national consolidation through social reform was undoubtedly important, this should be based entirely on rational foundations, said Lajpat Rai. And “nothing can be national or rational which is against the spirit of the Vedas”. This variety of blind faith has inspired a whole branch of history which today purports to be the truly scientific interpretation, purged of all the political implants. In this context, Kochhar’s work represents an effort to apply the widely accepted rul es of rational inquiry to both summarise the existing state of knowledge of the Vedas and propose some rather bold solutions to its many unresolved questions. He points out that the Vedas began to acquire value as historical documents, as opposed to pure ly priestly records of ritual, with the early European arrivals in India. The term “Arya”, which occurs frequently in the Vedas, was first understood as an epithet that could be applied to the speakers of the Vedic and analogous languages. But later phil ologists, in the flush of their discovery of the common roots of what are today called the Indo-European languages, provided a much broader ambit for the term. A further note of controversy was imparted by the elevation of the Aryan theory of race - tenuous at the best of times - to a hallowed principle of national revival. The German philologist Max Mueller had a crucial role in this respect. For certain eleme nts within Indian nationalism, the connotations of racial equality that the Aryan theory of race carried, seemed a promise of national redemption. The racial or ethnic basis of the Indian nation was its primeval origin in the days of Aryan glory and its scriptural underpinnings were provided by the Vedas. Since the idiom of nationalism then required every religion to have an encoded system of values, beliefs and practices, Hindu nationalism had little difficulty in casting the Vedas in that role. Archaeological excavations beginning around 1920 turned up evidence of the Indus Valley civilisation, confronting this school of thought with a serious challenge. This left the Hindu nationalists with no recourse but to seek to assimilate the Harappan ru ins to the Vedic literary corpus. In this enterprise, the antiquity of the Vedas had to be pushed back several centuries and the Vedic river Sarasvati had to be assigned a greater priority than the Indus as a cradle of ancient civilisation. The initial verdict from the archaeologists was devastating for the pretensions of the Vedic nationalists. As summed up by Mortimer Wheeler, “Indra”, the principal deity of the Vedas, “stood accused” of destroying the Harappan civilisation. One of the ma ny attributes of Indra that attracts frequent references in the Vedas is in fact, “Purandara” or “destroyer of forts”. From here, it was all too easy to build the theory of Aryan conquest over a settled Harappan civilisation, entrenching the supposed ant inomy of Aryan and Dravidian even deeper into the Indian political psyche. The “Aryan conquest” was a welcome hypothesis for the thinkers who had consistently opposed the Hindu revivalist agenda and read the Vedas as little more than a manifesto of racial separation and social hierarchy. Always a battleground of modern ideas, a ncient India became after this an even more sharply contested political terrain. Rationality could very easily have been the principal casualty of this sharp contest of political interests. Fortunately though, historical inquiry managed to transcend this bitter conflict between contemporary political interests. The varieties of evidence that Kochhar seeks to marshal in his task of establishing the authentic history of the Vedic people cover a wide range. When examining the literary evidence of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, he proceeds with the robust premis e that these Puranas “are a classic example of how history should not be recorded”. And yet, these oral accounts which were committed to written texts far after the events they purport to describe, remain the only source for the study of ancient history, and “rejecting them outright would be like throwing the baby with the bathwater”. Kochhar has no alternative, then, but to proceed on the basis of a number of plausible surmises. All genealogies are traced in the Puranas to the primal figure of Manu. Kochhar assumes that the lines of monarchical succession delineated in these texts ar e accurate and that a generation is roughly of 18 years duration. He then tests the narrative against astronomical phenomena of the period, which can be inferred with a fair measure of accuracy. Oblique references to the state of mathematical and geometr ical knowledge are culled out from the text and correlated with known details of the evolution of Indian thinking in these disciplines. His conclusion is that the Bharata battle, as an epic contest of strength between the diverse clans and tribes of the region, must have taken place around 900 B.C. He intentionally eschews the term “Mahabharata’ since the “Maha” he argues, refers only to the numerous embellishments that succeeding years have added on to the original account. This dating, in his view, is infirm when viewed in isolation. But it concurs with the dating that can be inferred from “more reliable sources such as the Vedic texts and archaeology”. IT is a verity often overlooked that modern territorial definitions have no meaning in the study of ancient history. To study the Vedas (or the first of them, the Rigveda) in isolation from the Zend Avesta, an almost equally hoary record of established r eligious practice from the Iranian region, would be in Kochhar’s view, completely futile. The congruences in the vocabulary and the content are too numerous to overlook and the partly antithetical philosophies strongly suggest an element of political con testation between the adherents of the two orthodoxies. Kochhar follows up this study of the texts with a broader analysis of their linguistic contexts in the larger Indo-Iranian and Indo-European habitats. A particularly striking feature of the book is its effort to separate the verbiage and the poetic effusions that surround the Rigvedic cult of Soma, (or Haoma in the Avesta) and identify its material basis. As a plant whose alkaloid resin is supposed to produce certain magical effects on its users, Kochhar examines several possible candidates for the category, before finally narrowing his focus to the ephedra plant which is known to grow profusely in the mountainous regions of Central Asia. The life-sustaining rivers Sarasvati and Sarayu are similarly common to both the Vedas and the Avesta. Modern orthodoxy allows that the Vedic Sarasvati could possibly refer to the Ghaggar river system, which is a rainwater drain for the Shivaliks and lat er broadens its channels as it transits into the Cholistan desert in modern-day Pakistan. Kochhar finds this identification to be rather flimsy for several reasons. Even after allowing for all possible geological and ecological changes over the millennia , it is simply implausible, he argues, to say that the mighty Sarasvati of the Vedic narrative could be in such reduced circumstances as today’s Ghaggar. The inferences that Kochhar draws are arresting and deserve quotation at some length: “…the river names Sarayu and Sarasvati, that occur in both the Rgveda and Avesta, refer to the rivers in Afghanistan. Sarayu is the same river, Hari-rud, in both cas es, whereas the name Sarasvati applied to the Helmand in the Rgveda is transferred to its tributary, the Arghandab, in the Avesta… The significance of the occurrence of the names Sarayu and Sarasvati in both the texts needs to be fully appreciated… T he most natural explanation for the commonality of these names is that they were given to the Afghan rivers by the Rgveda composing branch of the Aryans. The Iranian branch which came to dominate the area later, decided to retain the names. When the Rgve dic people moved eastwards, they carried these names along and selectively reused them. The names that were not reused lost their geographical identity and became literary terms. This would explain the curious fact that in spite of the Rgveda’s uninterru pted sanctity and the continuous Aryan presence in India, a large number of the Rgvedic names of rivers, lakes and mountains are unrecognisable.” The numerous “well-established linkages” between the Rigveda and the Avesta, Kochhar argues, firmly rule out “the Indian origin of the Aryans”. Equally definitively, it is simply inconceivable that the Harappan civilisation could have been Aryan. A numbe r of arguments are advanced in support of this assertion, one among them being the absence in known Harappan sites of any well-testified remnants of the horse, a crucial animal in Vedic lore. There are also serious mismatches between the available archaeological record and the Vedic descriptions, which fly in the face of the effort to identify the Ghaggar as the Vedic Sarasvati and ascribe to it a greater priority than the Indus in the Harapp an civilisation. “Archaeologically,” Kochhar points out, “the oldest (Harappan) sites are in Baluchistan, followed by the lower Indus, lower Ghaggar and upper Ghaggar in that order.” The Rigveda reverses this entire chronology, since the hymns venerating the Sarasvati are its oldest. Archaeologically in other words, there is a pointer to an eastward migration of the Vedic people, which can only be squared with the scriptural evidence if the Vedic Sarasvati is identified as the rivers of Afghanistan. All this constitutes a very provocative reading of ancient India. Being a relative outsider to the discipline of history, Kochhar is able to advance bold hypotheses that the more conventional historian would stop short of. But the audacity of his inferen ces is underpinned by rigorous scientific reasoning. And he forswears the notion of an Aryan conquest, preferring to argue on the basis of the preponderance of evidence that the reality was one of a gradual migration eastwards, an assimilation of pre-exi sting cultures in the Indus region and of progress into the Ganga-Yamuna basin following the discovery of iron. As a historian fully implicated in the process of inquiry, Kochhar brings to bear a unique combination of skills. His work is a synthesis of specialised writings in a range of disciplines, leavened by bold leaps of conjecture and imagination. The non-spe cialist would be amply rewarded for the effort put into comprehending Kochhar’s multifarious arguments. For the specialist, they constitute a challenge to innovate and work with new techniques of inquiry, to lay bare the social realities of the distant past.

 

 

 

From the book ‘Medicine and Life Sciences in India’, published by Centre for Studies in Civilization, 2001, New Delhi

 

Soma is a celebrated plant in the Rgveda as well as in Avesta, where it is called Haoma, later shortened to Horn in Pahalvi. A drink of the same name was extracted from the plant by pressing or crushing its stalk for offering to the gods and for drinking. (The name Soma comes from the root su, “to squeeze”.) Significance of the Soma cult is apparent from the fact that the Rgveda devotes a full mandala to it.1 The ninth mandala comprises 114 hymns, composed by different authors, but all addressed to Soma Pavamana, the purified Soma. The Rgveda’s longest hymn (RV 9.97) belongs to this mandala, which was prepared by taking out relevant hymns from the other mandalas and arranging them according to metre. There are only six dedicated Soma hymns outside the ninth mandala. In addition, there are numerous references to Soma in other hymns; the Rgveda is, so to speak, permeated by Soma2.

The Haoma plant figures in three hymns (9-11) in the Avesta. Yasna 9 is called the Horn Yast, while Yasna (10.18) uses the term Haoma’s Gathas. The use of the term Gatha is significant because the Yasts, believed to be composed by Zarathustra himself, are designated Gathas. Interestingly, the Zarathustrian Gathas do not make any reference to Haoma. 3

While Haoma is offered to all the gods, Soma, also called Indu, is particularly associated with Indra, who handsomely rewards his worshippers.4 The ~gvedic and Avestan mythologies associated with S6ma/Haoma run parallel. Soma/Haoma is of celestial origin. In the Rgveda (RV 4.27.3;9.72.2), an eagle or falcon brings it to the earth against the wishes of the celestial guards like Krsanu, who is known to the Avesta as Keresani (Yasna 9.24). In RV (8.12.16), Indra drinks Soma by Trita Aptya’s side. Valakhilya (4.1) mentions Vivasvat’s son Manu and Trita among the ancient sacrificers, whose Soma had once pleased Indra. The Horn Yast lists the names of early Haoma- pressers, which in Sanskritized form are Vivasvat, the father of Yama; Aptya, the father of Traitana; and Trita, whose two named sons are not known to the Rgveda.

The Rgveda makes a sharp distinction between those who press Soma and those who do not: “You scattered the settlement of ti}e non-pressers, maintaining your upper hand

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 725

as the Soma drinker” (RV 8.14.15). ‘May we win in fights over those who do not press [Soma]‘ (RV 1.110.7). There is a rivalry among the Soma drinkers themselves, with different sacrificers aimed at enlisting Indra’s support. ‘When you have mounted on your car, let your yoked Boy Steeds carry you past other men’s libations’ (RV 8.33.14). Or, more simply, ‘Let not other sacrificers hold you’ (RV 2.18.3). A specific instance of rivalry within the Soma club is provided by RV(7.32.2): ‘Indra preferred Vasistha’s to the Soma pressed by Pasadyurnna Vayata’.

Attributes

Soma is the mascot of the Aryans. Whatever the Avestan and the ~gvedic people needed or wished at individual and collective level, they asked Soma/Haoma to provide. Somal Haoma is thus perceived as a giver of immortality, a healthy and long life, offspring, happiness, courage, strength, victory over enemies, wisdom, understanding and creativity. The attributes of Soma/Haoma fall into two categories. The culture-specific attributes tell us about the needs, fears, wishes, aspirations and accon:l.plishments of the Rgveda and Avestan people. The role assigned to the Soma plant is incidental; these attributes could easily have been endowed on any other plant. In contrast, there are the object -specific details, which tell us about the plant itself.

First, the culture-specific attributes. According to Yasna (9.23), Haoma grants good husbands to maidens. In RV(8.80), a maiden, Apala by name, plucks Soma twigs by the wayside and chews them with the purpose of becoming attractive to men. Haoma provides brilliant and righteous offspring to pregnant women (Yasna 9.22). Anyone who maltreats Haoma is cursed to remain childless (Yasna 11.3). As if aware of this, in ~V (8.31.5), ‘with constant draught of milk, husband and wife with one accord press out and wash the Soma juice’, no doubt as a prelude to sexual intercourse. The Soma drink enables the poetic drinker to compose a hymn. Therefore, Soma is very frequently called a Kavi, poet. Soma is ‘the procreator of thoughts’ (RV 9.95.5), and is rsikrt, ‘the maker of seers’ (9.96.18). In RV (9.107.18), ‘the poet Soma procreates the thought’. The composer of RV (3.43.5) plainly asks: ‘Will you not make me the protector of people, make me the king, 0 Soma-dlinking lord, make me the rsi after I have drunk of Soma? Will you not give me of the excellent Arnrta?’

In addition to these psychological attributes, we obtain some valuable object-specific physical charcteristics. Soma prevents sleep; it keeps the drinker awake and alerts. ‘The Gods seek him who presses out the Soma; they desire not sleep. They punish sloth unweariedly’ (RV 8.2.18). Indra is awake, because he has drunk Soma (RV 8.92.33). Soma is jagrvi (awake) (RV 9.36.2; 9.44.3; 9.106.4).

It seems that some of the Rgvedic poetry was composed at night after drinking Soma. As RV (5.44.14) puts it, ‘the sacred hymns love him, who wakes and watches; to him who watches come the sarnan verses. This Soma says to the man who watches, I rest and have my dwelling in the friendship’. In RV (9.97.37), Soma is awake and has become ‘a singer most like Angiras’. In the same creative spirit, the poet in RV (8.48.14) wishes that neither sleep nor idle talk should govern him after he has drunk Soma. Soma’s ability

726 Rajesh Kochhar

to keep one awake was known outside the poetic circles also. To the gambler in RV (10.34.1) the die that never sleeps is dearer than the deep draught of Soma from Mujavat.

Of all the Indo-Europeans, the Indo-Iranians are the only ones who took to composing (and preserving) hymns. One wonders whether this is due to Soma. Soma is called an ancient plant (RV 9.98.11). It was a matter of pride to have Soma drinkers among one’s ancestors. ‘With you, a Soma Pavamiina, our wise fathers conducted their affairs’ (RV 9.96.11). Similarly, ‘Our Soma-drinking fathers, the most excellent ones, who came for the Soma drink’ (RV 10.15.8). Does this mean that in the community there were members, whose ancestors had been outside the Soma fold?

The Soma/Haoma tree was leafless. The juice was extracted from the shoots or stalks, never from the fruits or berries. A number of terms are used to denote the stalks: arrziu (literatlly “ray”), ksip (”finger”), vaksana (”tube”), vana (”cane”). All these terms indicate that the shoots were long and thin. In the Avesta, the shoots are called asu (corresponding to amsu). The term frasparega is also used where the word without the prefix ‘fra’ corresponds to the English sprig. The processs of juice extraction is called milking in the Rgveda, no doubt, owing to the resemblence between the stalks and the cow’s teats. The term ksip is particularly apt, because the stalks, like the fingers, had joints, called parvan or parsu.

The colour of the stalk was ruddy (aruna), brown (babhru), or golden (hari), corresponding to zairi in the Avesta. (In the Avesta, the plant is called Haoma-zairi to distinguish it from three other Haomas, persons or deities.)6 A very important characteristic of the Soma plant is that it was sweet-scented (Yasna 10.4, RV 9.97.19; 9.107.2).

The Rgveda (but not Avesta) uses the term andhas to denote the whole plant as well as the extracted juice? The significance of the term lies in the fact that it is cognate with the Greek word anthos, meaning flower. Here, then, we have an old Indo-European word with a change in meaning.

The Rgveda names a number of localities, where Soma was consumed: .4.rjikii, Pastyiivant, Saryal:liivant, Susomii (a river), etc. Unfortunately, it is not possible to identify any of them8. An important piece of information is that Soma grew in the mountains. This fact is mentioned or alluded to in a number of places in the J!.gveda. Thus, Soma is called parvatiivrdh, ‘mountain grown’ (RV 9.46.1). (In the Atharvaveda (3.21.10), the mountains are called Somapr:5tha, ‘carrying Soma on their back’.) RV (10.34.1) uses the term Soma Maujavata, ‘the Soma from Mujavat’. The latter according to Yaska’s Nirukta (9.8) was a mountain9.

Yasna (10.10) mentions Haraiti Bareza (also called Hara Barazaiti) as the Soma habitat. Haraiti is identified with Mount Elburz. But it must be borne in mind that the name Elburz not only denoted the present Mount Elburz, a peak in the Caucasus, but was applied to the whole range of mountains, extending from the Hindu Kush in the East to the Caucasus in the West1O.

Yasna (10.17) quotes Zarathustra as saying, ‘I praise all the Haoma plants, as many as there are on the high plateaus of mountains, as many as there are in the depths of the valleys, as many as there are in the gorges, which are tied into the bundles of women’.

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 727

Interestingly, while the Avesta shows familiarity With a much larger Soma-growing area than the Rgveda, it is the Rgveda, which displays greater variety as regards the colour of the shoots.

The Soma ritual, though elaborate, comprised a number of simple steps: extraction of juice, its collection, purification, modification, libation and consumption. It is clear from the }:tgvedic references that Soma pressing took place three times a day: in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. Yasna (10.2) refers to only two pressings a day.

There were two methods of extracting the juice from the Soma stalks. One could use mortar (ulukhala) and pestle (mantha) for processing the plant. In RV (1.28.;3), a woman uses the mortar in preparing the drink, and refers (RV 1.28.5) to a similar practice in ‘house after house’. To the extent it is permissible to generalize from a solitary hymn, mortar with pestle was the preferred (more convenient?) method of preparing the drink by the house-holders. Significantly, the Avestan practice was also to use a mortar, called havana (Vendidad 14.8).

A woman ‘pushing [the pestle] backwards and forwards’ had no place in the ritual. The ritualistic practice was to pound the stalks between two stones held in hands. The stones, called adri or gravan (in singular), were held in high esteem. Three hymns (RV 10.76;10.94;10.175) are dedicated to them; in addition, these stones figure in many other hymns. The stones were pounded with loud sound to scare away the evil spirits. At least in the later rituals, holes were bored to increase the sound. The stones were placed on cow-hide (tvac), which acted as a receptacle for the juice. Sometimes, the stalks were soaked in water to increase the yield (RV 9.75.9).

The next step was to purify the juice. This was done by passing the juice through a strainer made of sheep’s wool. The most common designation for the Soma juice passing through the strainer is pavamana or punana, the action itself being denoted by the verb pfi. (It is significant that in Punjabi, the word for straining is punana as against chhanana in Hindi.) The juice was of the same colour as the stalks and of the same scent as the plant (RV 9.97.19; 9.107.2). It could be taken either pure or mixed with other ingredients. The pure, unmixed Soma, called sukra or suci, was offered to Vayu and Indra. Vayu is . called sucipa (RV 7. 90.2,etc) and sukra-pfitapa (RV 8.46.26); both meaning ‘pure-drinker’. Vayu and Indra are jointly called sucipa in RV (7.91.4). A number of substances were available for addition to the pure Soma juice, described as tfvra, (astringent): milk, curd, water, barley, clarified butter (ghee), and perhaps honey. For later reference, we may note that poppy or cannabis was never added. In the whole procedure, there was no time for fermentation, nor was any fermented beverage (sura) ever added to Soma.

Substitutes

There is a striking similarity between the Vedic agni-stoma and the Zoroastrian Haoma ceremony, both of which must therefore have originated in the (common) Indo-Iranian period11. In the Brahma1:ta period, the Soma plant ceased to be a commonplace. It became a prized item in the ritual, which was difficult to procure, and so was first rationed and then. substituted. In the Baudhayana Srauta-sfitra (6.14), the adhvaryu asks the seller if

728 Rajesh Kochhar

the Soma came from Mujavat, which obviously was still a source of supply. In the Yajurveda (Maitraya’:11-sa1!1hita 1.160), the sacrificial offerings are hung from a tree with the words, ‘This is your portion, 0 Rudra! With this food pass by beyond the Mfijavat’12. By now, Mfijavat is the civilizational outpost, beyond which lay the unknown.

Katyayana’s Srauta-sfitra (10.9.30) enjoins the priests not to give the genuine Soma to a K§atriya or a VaiSya, even when it was available. They should instead be given the juice of the fruit of the nyagrodha tree (FiCl.lS indica, now called Ficus bengalensis, the Indian fig) 13. Satapatha Brahmal:ta (4.5.10.2-6) lists the substitutes for use in the ritual, when Soma is not available. In decreasing order of preference, they are the Phalguna plant with the red blossom; the Syenahrra plant; the Adara plant; the reddish Durva plant; or as the last resort, any of the golden-coloured grasses14. The explicit mention of red and golden suggests that the substitutes were chosen to resemble the original Soma in one parameter, the colour. Also, the cow to be given as the price for Soma should be red-brown with red-brown eyes, no doubt, because this was the Soma colour (Satapatha Brahma’:1a 3.3.1.14) 15.

The Soma substitutes are linked to the original Soma through mythology. When Gayatrl was bringing Soma, a shoot fell down and became the Syenahrra plant. When the head of the sacrificial victim was cut off, the Adara took shape from the juice squirting forth from it. Therefore, Adara can be used in place of Soma16.

The choice of the Soma substitute was not unique, but depended on the school. Tandya Maha-Brahmana (9.5.1-3) recommends the use of the putika creeper (Guilandina bonduc or Basella cordifolia). Or else, the dark grass known as arjunani could be used. Various other substitutes figure in the Brahmal:tas; syamaka (cultivated millet), mufija grass, kattr’:1a (a fragrant grass), and par’:1a (a sacred tree, Butea frondosa) 17.

The Brahmanas reverentially reserve the name Soma for the original }:tgvedic plant and talk of its substitutes. The reverence disappears in the later period, when the term Soma becomes free of all encumbrances, and is applied, normally suffixed with lata or valli (meaning creeper), to local plants (these terms do not figure in the Rigveda). There must still have been some memory of the original plant, because like the Rgvedic Soma, all Soma-latas and Soma-vallis are leafless with fleshy stems.

At the same time, the original Soma became a mythical plant. The Vedic commentators and Sanskrit lexicographers freely speculated on Soma. Amara Simha, the earliest of the Indian lexicographers (c. AD 450), lists many synonyms of what he calls Soma-valli, and also describes a plant Soma-raji. Sabarasvami, in his commentary on the Pfirva-mima1!1Sa-sfitra (2.2.17), calls Soma a creeper that yields milky juice. The milky attribute was probably based on the ~edic statements that Soma was mixed with milk18.

Even the medical texts give fanciful descriptions. Susruta-samhita (29) says that although originally there was a creation of one Soma-valli, it was later divided into 24 varieties, one smelling like ghee, the other having leaves like those of garlic, still others looking like cast-off snake skins, etc. Both Susruta-samhita (29.21-22) and Caraka-sa1!1hita (1.4-6) claim that Soma had 15 leaves, which appeared one per day during the waxing moon (sukla-paksa), and dropped off one by one during the waning moon (krsna-paksa)19.

.

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 729

To sum up so far, the }:Rgvedic Soma (as well as the Avestan Haoma) is a scented leafless plant with thin and long jointed juicy stalks, which grew in the mountainous region. The juice was extracted by pressing the stalks and drunk unfermented. In effect, it was energizing, invigorating and anti-sleep. The Brahmarna texts preserve the memory of the original Soma, and prescribe various substitutes which ranging as they do from grasses to trees are unable to provide any clues to the master plant. In the Jater period, while on the one hand the original Soma was mythified; on the other, the name Soma, often with a suffix, was given to a localy available field plant, usually a creeper.

Identification

The question of identity of the ancient Soma was taken up in the wake of ever increasing European commercial and colonial interest in India and its neighbourhood. There is no gainsaying the fact that the Soma studies constitute the most disappointing part of the Indic scholarship. Instead of asking the question as to what the }:Rgvedic Somal Avestan Haoma was, the studies were begun from the wrong chronological end. As part of the natural history survey, that was progressively carried out in conjunction with the British territorial expansion, Latin names were assigned to Indian plants and juxtaposed with their native names ascertained from local informers. This is how the various Soma-latas, Soma-vallls and Soma-rajis allover the country came to acquire their botanical names. Next, one or the other of these plants was boldly declared to be the plant of the ancient texts. In the absence of collation of the diverse field data and of any worthwhile acquintance with ancient texts that could constrain free flights of fancy, Soma was reduced to a mere Sanskrit name that could be tagged on to any of the superficially resembling plants. Somehow, an acquaintance with the Latin name of the plant gave the whole exercise a scholarly look.

In the whole debate lasting two centuries, not a single idea was rejected for good as being untenable, nor was any accepted as constituting received wisdom on the subject. The debate remained open, superficial and repetitive with the participants responding to each other rather than to the primary source material. Beating about the Soma bush became a badge of scholarship for a large number of European travellers and officers. Since the agenda was defined by dilettantes, even serious scholarship lost its moorings.

Historically, the European notice of SomalHaoma began in 1771 with Du Perron’s French translation of the Avesta. Du Perron quoted Farhang Jahangiri to say that Horn is a tree which grows in Persia in the mountains of Shirwan, Guillan, Mazendran and the neighbourhood of Yezd. It resembles sweet heather, its knots are very close to each other, and the leaves are like those of jasmine. He went on to say that Horn did not grow in India and that ‘the Dasturs of India are in the habit of sending at the end of a certain season two Parsees to Kerman to search for the branches of Horn’. The continuity in the Zoroastrian tradition provides a very valuable clue2°. At that time, however, neither the }:tgvedic Soma nor the Indo-Iranian connection was known. Du Perron’s first-hand account therefore went unnoticed.

730 Rajesh Kochhar

The first mention of Soma in English appeared in 1784 in Charles Wilkins’ translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In a footnote, Wilkins added that Soma was a creeper the juice of which was drunk at the conclusion of a sacrifice. The first attempt to identify Soma was made by [Sir] William Jones in 1794, who proposed that Soma was a mountain-rue.

Twenty years later, the exercise shifted from the library to the field. William Roxburgh, the first official superintendent of the East India Company’s botanical garden in Calcutta during 1793-1814, prepared a catalogue of its 3500 plants. This catalogue, called Hortus Bengalensis, was published in 1814. (His magnum opus Flora India came out in 1832). Roxburgh identified the plant, locally known as Soma-lata with Sarcostemma brevistigma (=Asclepios acida), ‘a leafless bush of green succulent branches, growing upwards with flowers like those of an onion’. He also pointed out that a different plant, a rue called Ruta graveolens, was also called Soma-lata. More importantly, he observed that Himalayan plants do not grow in Bengal21. This point, of significance in the understanding of ancient texts, was ignored. The Sarcostemma saga had begun.

Sarcostemma juice, however, presented a problem. It was noted in 1832 that ‘native travellers often suck the tender shoots to allay their thirst’22. It was pointed out in 1845 that “farmers use S.brevistigma to rid their fields of white ants’. Also, that the sap of the Asclepiads was bitter and acrid and in the West Indies given to children in doses of a teaspoon to a tablespoon as a remedy for worms23. These were hardly the attributes of a drink that was earlier enthusiastically imbibed three times a day. The contradiction perhaps had not been lost on the Sarcostemma-using Vedic commentators, who were as clueless to the identity of the original Soma as the later-day European enquirers. John Stevenson, in his 1842 translation of the Samaveda, says that Soma is S. viminale and that ‘according to the commentator, it is pressed and mixed with barley and allowed to stand for nine days.’ Fermentation of the juice was probably a means of camouflaging its bitterness. Displaying an orientalist bent of mind, not uncommon those days, William Dwight Whitney could say patronizingly, in 1853, ‘the simple-minded Arian [sic] people …had no sooner perceived that this liquid had power to … produce a temporary frenzy… than they found in it something divine’24.

In 1855, Max Muller dug up an old Ayurvedic verse25, which described Soma as a black creeper, sour, leafless, yielding milk, having fleshy skin, dissolving (or producing?) phlegm, causing vomiting, and eaten by goats. Though the description fitted Sarcostemma, Max Muller asked a valid question: If this freely available plant was indeed the Soma, then why did the Brahma~a-period priests have to use putika as a substitute? The passage was not taken up for discussion till 30 years later, when attention was drawn to its lateness and to the uncertainty whether the drug dissolved phlegm or produced phlegm.

Soon, field data started becoming available from different parts of the country. In 1866, J. Forbes Watson described the “Telugu” Soma-lata as S.brevistigma, and the “Sanskrit” Soma-lata as Ruta graveolens26. In 1874, Arthur Coke Burnell pointed out that the Hindus on the Coromandel coast used S.brevistigma in their rites, while their counterparts on the Malabar coast used a different plant, Ceropegia decaisneana or

C. elegans27.

In 1873, Rajendra Lal Mitra (1822 or 24-1891), who later became the first President of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, proposed a new hypothesis, doing away with the ancient

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 731

texts as it were. The Soma juice, he said, was merely a figure of speech. The Soma plant did not provide a drink by itself. Rather, like the hops, it was added to accelerate the fermentation of paddy and barley decoction to produce a kind of a beer. It is a measure of the confused scholarship on the subject that this dubious hypothesis received wide support, including from Max Muller, who concluded, to his satisfaction, that the original Soma was hop, later replaced by a Sarcostemma. He even suggested that the two words were etymologically related ! 28

A hundred years after Du Perron, Haoma finally entered the debate. In 1878, Friedrich Spiegel reported afresh that the Indian Parsees sent their priests’ to Kerman to bring Haoma29. In December 1884, the naturalist A.Houtum-Schindler wrote from Teheran that the plant used by the Zoroastrians in Kerman and Yezd agreed with the Sarcostemma30. In 1885, the botanist George Watt wrote that Dr Dymock, of Bombay, had sent him a Haoma plant, which was Periploca aphylla. 31 That these were mis-identfications soon became obvious.

During 1884-86, the British sent a commission to Afghanistan to determine its boundaries in conjunction with a similar commission from the Tsarist Russia. One of the members of the British commission was a professional botanist, James Edward Tierney Aitchison, who was asked to report on the Afghan flora and fauna. Earlier, he had supported the view that Soma was wine. The assignment made him change his opinion. While in Afghanistan, in 1885, he received from the Bombay-based Parsi scholar, [Sir] Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, samples of Horn for identification. Aitchison wrote back as follows.

“The specimens you sent me are the twigs of a species Ephedra… A species grows all over this country-Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Western Thibet-which seems to be identical with the species received. This species is here, in all this country, called Hum (pronounced as the English word whom, also Huma). In Baluchistan, it, as well as totally a distinct plant, Periploca aphylla, is called Hum. It grows equally on exposed hills and valleys, consisting of ‘branches and sprigs’, one mass of upright twig, if you notice, being made of joints like the joints of the fingers. When covered with male flowers, the bush (from 1 to 2 feet) is golden coloured, and the twigs are more or less so .,. This plant has no leaves. It is all twigs and jointed. Among the Pathans of the Khyber pass and all over that country, the twigs are, with water, made into a decoction, and employed very largely as a house-hold remedy in sickness, and are considered as possessing health- giving and healing properties. Owing to a general likeness between the stiff rod-like growth. upright and erect, of the two plants, in Baluchistan, the natives equally give both the same name. No one would mistake the jointed and true Hum for the non-jointed false Hum, Periploca.” 32

Aitchison concluded by saying, “before your letter and specimens came, I had made up my mind that the Ephedra was the nearest to the ‘Soma’ plant that I got to, but as it was stated that the Parsees employed the twigs of Periploca~ it rather put me out. Your ~pecimens are all on my side”33.

(This letter was included by Modi, in 1922, in his book “The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Parsees”). On return to England, Aitchison published, in 1887, a

732 Rajesh Kochhar

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 733

734 Rajesh Kochhar

technical report on his findings. Further ‘Support came in 1893, when Joseph Bomrnuller wrote (in German) about his encounter with a Zoroastrian priest in Yezd canying Hum, which he at once recognized as Ephedra distachya. He added that large quantities of it were dried and sent to Bombay every year34.

In 1912, Macdonell and Keith, unable to cut through the maze of conflicting opinions, declared in their Vedic Index that ‘it is very probable that the plant cannot now be identified’35, thereby conveniently exempting the geographical interpretations of the ~eda from the severest constraint that the Rgveda itself supplies. Two years later, in 1914, the archaeological evidence on the use of Ephedra in Central Asia (but not necessarily as Soma/Haoma) about 2000 years ago was uncovered by Aurel Stein,36 who had been a student of the Gennan Sanskritist Rudolf Von Roth and was familiar with the official brief on Soma prepared for use by the Mghan commission. An examination of widely distant cemeteries in the Lou-Ian area of the Lop desert in the western Chinese province of Xinjiang (Sinkiang) revealed that in the case of six well-preserved graves in different cemeteries, small broken stalks of Ephedra had been tied up into little bunches on the edges of woollen shrouds. ‘In most of the other graves at these cemeteries, the bodies and their belongings were found in a badly decayed state hampering the close examination of details. But it may be safely assumed that the provision of such small packets fonned part of the regular practice among the indigneous people “37 Stein recalled that the Chinese use an Ephedra called Ma-huang to get an alkaloid drug (Ephedrine). He, however, naively concluded that Ephedra could not be Soma, because Ephedra was bitter, while Soma was sweet. If he had read his }:Rgveda, he would have realized that Ephedra’s inherent bitterness was consistent with the fact already noted that the unmixed Soma juice was called tivra.

Finally, in 1951, Karl Friedrich Geldner, in his posthumously published Gennan translation of the Soma hymns, declared that the }:Rgvedic Soma was indeed Ephedra38.

In reaction to the alcohol hypothesis of Soma, but with the same disregard for the Rgvedic evidence, it was suggested that Soma was hallucinogenic. Two candidates that are easily dismissed are Cannabis sativa (hemp) and Peganum harmala (wild rue). The hemp preparations, ganja, bhang and charas, result in an altered, dreamy state of consciousness with a feeling of well-being and even joy. Senses are sharpened and, with strong doses, hallucinations may occur. The human mind turns inwards, and aggressive behaviour is unlikely to occur. 39 Wild rue is a perenimal, branched herb with whitish flowers and narrow leaves. Its seeds are used as a remedy for many different diseases. The plant is fairly common in parts of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Sind, Ba~uchistan and Waziristan. Unlike the Soma plant, there is nothing “flamentous” in P.Hannala, which, moreover, has a seductive rather than stimulating effect. 40

In 1968, the eminent ethnomycologist, R.Gordon Wasson, introduced another Soma candidate: the mushroom fly-agaric, amanita muscaria. The 8-20 cm high mushroom has a white stem and a large (5-15 cm diameter), mostly red, cap with white patches. 41 Fly- agaric owes its hallucinogic properties to isoxazole compounds, which pass the human renal system intact and are thus present in the urine of the mushroom eater. 42 Since

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 735

ancient times, the fly-agaric has been used as a hallucinogen in nonhero Siberia, where the custom of urine drinking has been well-documented.

Wasson suggested that the mushroom fly-agaric be identified with the Soma/Haoma plant, and its orange-coloured juice with the soma/Haoma drink. He went on to distinguish between two forms of Soma: the first form of a direct drink; and the second form of the urine of the primary drinker. He claimed to have found passages in the Rgveda and Yasna, which referred to the Soma/Haoma urine.44 It is recorded that when it was casually mentioned to Wasson that the Rgveda refers to the “pis sing” of Soma (RV 9.74.4), he immediately connected it to the Siberian practice.43 (Wasson’s translation: The swollen men piss the flowing [Soma]. Generally understood translation is “the Maruts (Rudras) pouring down rain, figuratively considered as the urine of their heavenly horses.”45

In an extensive critique, Brough pointed out that Wasson was in error: “Some of the translations he [Wasson} used were misleading, and that he seemed to arbitrarily connect Rgvedic phrases and verses which do not properly belong together. More matter-of-factly, the juice of the mushroom comes from the cap, and not from the stem, as the Rgveda would demand. 46

Wasson's hypothesis, contained in a well-produced, well-illustrated book, did serve a useful purpose; it brought the Soma problem once again into sharp focus. -While Sarcostemma may well have been the commonly-used substitute for Soma in the later period, there is now a growing consensus among experts in the field that 'there is no need for a plant other than Ephedra for the original Soma... Ephedra fits each and every detail of the texts'.47

The various varieties of Ephedra look like bushes of leafless, jointed twigs, some prostrate, but mostly standing erect 1-6 feet high (Figure 1). The plant has a pine-like aroma and a strong astringent taste. It owes its importance to the alkaloid Epherdrine (CIO HIS ON) extracted from its twigs. The alkaloidal content of the plant increaes with age. Twigs are much richer in alkaloidal content than the woody stems, while the roots are bereft. The best plants are four year old and in blossom; the best time for harvesting twigs is after the rains but before the winter frost.48

Ephedrine is soluble in water and can be taken orally. It stimulates the nervous system, increases the intake of oxygen, and acts as a restorative and a mild anaesthetic agent.49 Compared to adrenaline which must be injected, Ephedrine's effect is slower and less intense but more persistent. It dilates the pupil and contracts the uterus. Soma's role as an aphrodisiac can only be attributed to the general feeling of euphoria that Ephedrine causes. In excessive doses, ephedrine causes nervousness, insomnia, headache, vertigo, palpitation, sweating, nausea and vomiting. When the Rgvedic poet asks Soma to be sweet to our heart (RV 8.68.7) and 'wound not our heart with dazzling flame' (RV 8.68.7), he is probably requesting for exemption from the effects of over-indulgence.

Ephedra's utility as a geographical diagnostic comes from the fact that it does not grow every where, and all its varieties do not contain Ephedrine. Four species of Ephedra are native to the mountaineous regions of north India, Afghanistan and Iran: Egerardiana (E. vulgaris, H.distachya), E.major (E.nebrodensis)'; E.intermedia and E.pachyclada. They all

736 Rajesh Kochhar

contain Ephedrine. In addition, there is E.foliata, which grows in the plains of south , Punjab and Rajasthan. It does not contain any appreciable quantity of Ephedrine. The rest of India is not the natural habitat of any species of Ephedra. Local names of Ephedra were. recorded a hundred years ago. Thus E.gerardiana is called asmania, butshur, budshur and chewa in Punjab, Phok in the Satluj valley; tse, tsapatt and trano in Ladhak; and khanda and kharna in Kunawar (not identified). 50

Since the Rgvedic Aryans could pluck twigs from the wayside, they must have lived in the mountainous regions. Since the Avestans were also using Soma, the common residence can be nqrrowed down to the Hindu Kush and its western environs. The species native to Chitral, Baluchistan and Mghanistan, E.pachyclada, can then be singled out as the Soma of the ~gveda. The name for the plant still survives in the region, as noted by Aitchison: Hum in the Herat valley, as well as in Balucm, Pashto and Brahui, and Sam in Gilgit, Chitral and Kafiristan. The remarkable fact that the same name designates a plant in a vast area also points towards its great antiquity.

When we identify Ephedra as Soma and place the ~gvedic people in the Ephedra- habit~t Hindu Kush, all the diverse pieces of the puzzle fall into place. The vast Ephedra- growIng area m Mghamstan and Iran was occupIed by or was accessIble to the Indo-Iranians, who could develop a common Soma/Haoma cult. As the Indo-Aryans moved eastwards, their distance from Soma increased, first cutting down the supply and then stopping it altogether. Finally, in the plains, Soma's place in the rituals was given to the substitutes. In course of time, Soma became a mythical plant.

In its transition from an easily available herb that could be processed by husband" and wife in their home to a myth even for the later-day medical celebrities, Soma records" the distance the Indo-Aryans traversed, figuratively and literally, from the ~gvedic times to the classical period.

Archaeological evidence

Archaeological evidence for the cultic use of Ephedra has been uncovered in the Murghab delta (known to the Greeks as Margiana) in southern Turkmenistan.51 At Togolok 21 (with a calibrated radiocarbon date of 1745 BC)52, archaeologists unearthed a huge rectangular complex, 130m x 100 m in size, with circular turrets at the comers and semi- circular ones at mid-walls. Inside this was another rectangle, much smaller, but also with circular and semi-circular turrets. All along the inner side: of its western wall, there were 30 odd narrow rooms (Figure 2).

Inside this rectangle is the 'fortress', measuring 50 m x 60 m with 4.5 m thick walls, and turrets. In the middle of the northern wall, there is a central portal, flanked by two monumental pylons. One of the rooms inside the fortress is plastered white with gypsum. Along its walls are special brick platforms into which vessels have been sunk. Chemical analysis has revealed that the organic material from inside these vessels contains microscopic twigs of Ephedra as well as poppy. Traces of poppy were found on the stone mortar and pestle also. It seems that the purpose of the apparatus was to prepare a sacred drink.

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 737

The eastern wall of the outermost rectangular structure contained a niche near t~e northern comer, which has a number of connected rooms. Walls and floors of these rooms were also plastered white with gypsum, like the inner Ephedra room. The passages from the rooms lead to the northern side of the niche, where two round brick-faced altars have been dug into the earth. The smaller, flat-bottomed altar contained a half-metre thick layer of compressed ash. It seems to have been dedicated to the fire cult. The larger altar, conical and deep, has a shell hearth in the centre with remnants of coal. There is a large stain on its wall, suggesting that this altar was used for ritual libations. 53

Similar structures have been found at Gonur 1 (dated 1887 BC) 54 and Togolok 1. At Gonur 1, the vessels contained remnants of poppy and cannabis in addition to Ephedra. 55 It is notewonhy that while Ephedra has been identified with the Soma/Haoma plant of the Rgveda and Avesta, there is no indication of the use of poppy and cannabis in these texts. In Rgveda, one drank Soma to keep awake; addition of poppy to the drink would have had an opposite effect.

Who the Togolok 21 people were, and how they were related to the Avestan-Rgvedic people are not known. Nevertheless, the evidence of the use of Ephedra in the region is significant.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The material in this chapter has been taken from Kochhar (2000).

NOTES

To help place an author's work in context, the original date of publication is given, rather than of tranalsation or reprint. Enclosure of a page number in square brackets denotes that the reference is to a reprint, which very often is a jacsimili of the original.

1. A convenient, if not always the best, source of English translation of the Rgveda in Griffith (1896).

2. Brough (1971; 331).

3. SBE (1887, [31 : 230-47]).

4. Hillebrandt (1927, [1:129-51]) provides a summary of the characteristics of the Soma plant, as culled from the Rgveda and Avesta. For a useful summary of information in later texts, see a’Flaherty (1968).

5. Falk (1989 :79).

6. Modi (1937 :[283]).

7. Hillebrandt (1927; II : 145]) 8. Ibid. [175]

9. Ibid. [154-6].

10. Modi (1937: [205]). 11. Ibid. [182].

12. Hillebrandt (1927, [1:156]). 13. Ibid.[158]

14. O’Flaherty (1968 :96)

15. Hillebrandt (1927, [1:136]) 16. Ibid.[159].

17. O’Flaherty (1968 : 96-7)

18. Ibid.94 iT:”‘” J

738 Rajesh Kochhar

19. Ibid.99

20. Ibid.102 21. Ibid.103

22. Watt (1890 :249)

23. O’Flaherty (1968 :106). 24. Ibid.106-7.

25. The verse occurs in Dhurtasvami’s commentary on the Apastamba Sraiitasiitra (O’Flaherty 1968 : 100).

26. O’Flaherty (1968 : 108). 27. Ibid.110. 28. Ibid. 109. 29. Ibid.110. 30. Ibid. 118.

27. Ibid. 110

28. Ibid. 109

29. Ibid 110

30. Ibid. 118

31. Watt (1890: 248).

32. Modi (1937: [285]).

33. Ibid. [286])

34. O’Flaherty (1968 :122).

35. Macdonell & Keith (1912, [11:475]).

36. Stein (1931; 503).

37. It is now suspected that Stein might not have found Ephedra at all; some of his floral samples were examined in Kew Gardens, and found to be the remains of horsetails (Equisetum equisetaceae). Nyberg (1995 : [399]).

38. Geldner (1951, 111:1)

39. Nyberg (1995 : [386]). 40. Nyverg (1995 : [390]). 41. Nyberg (1995 : [390]). 42. Nyberg (1995 : [392]) 43. Nyberg (1995 : [393]). 44. Wasson (1968 : 25).

45. Brough (1971: 346).

46. Nyberg (1995 : [393]).

47. Falk (1989 : 57). Similarly, Nyberg (1995: [400]) : ‘the ephedras best meet both the textual and pharmacological requirements for the botanical identification of soma/haoma’. However, Needham (1974: 5.11 :116) accepts Wasson’s hypothesis. More surprisingly, a well-regarded Sanskrit scholar writing two decades later calls Soma a ‘hallucinogenic drink’ [Brockington, 1995 : [7]) and accepts, though tentatively, Wasson’s identification (Brockington, 1995 : [17]). Recently, Brockington, has’ made his position clear in a personal communication: ‘Harry Falk has mounted a powerful argument in favour of an older identification with members of the Ephedra species; much of what he says is very plausible, and on balance I regard it as the most probable hypothesis yet advanced, although its weakest point in my mind is the relatively slight effects of ephedrine, compared with those claimed for Soma’. As to the last point, one wonders whether the Indo-Iranians were carried away by the novelty of Soma/Haoma, the like of which they had never tasted before.

48. Sastri (1952 : 177-8).

50. It is noteworthy that Ephedrine figures in the International Olympic Committee’s blacklist of banned substances (Day 1998 : 18)

50. Watt (1989 : 251-2).

51. Sarianidi (1986 : 5-6). 52. Possehl (1994 : 116). 53. Sarianidi (1987 : 49). 54. Possehl (1994 : 37).

55. Sarianidi (1994 : 388).

The Rgvedic Soma Plant 739

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Brough, J. (1971) Soma and Amanita Muscaria. Journal of School of Oriental and African Studies, 34 : 331-62.

Day, Michael 0998) If you cannot beat them, join them. New Scientist, 160, No.2155 00 Oct.), 18-19.

Falk, Harry 0989) Soma I and II. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 52 : 77-90.

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Hillebrandt, A. 0927-29) Vedische My tho logie, 2nd ed. (Engl.tr. by S.R.Sarma), Motilal Banarasi Dass, Delhi, 1990).

Kochhar, Rajesh (2000) The Vedic People: Their History and Geography. Hyderabad : Orient Longman.

Macdonell, A.A. & Keith, A.B. 0912) Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, 2 Vols. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsi Dass Reprint, 1982)

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Nyberg, H. 0995) The problem of the Aryans and the Soma: The Botanical evidence. In : The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethmicity, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, Reprint, 1997).

O’Flaherty, W.D. 0968) The Post-Vedic History of the Soma Plant. In: Wasson 0968).

Possehl, G. 0994) Radiometric Dates for South Asian Archaeology. Philadelpia : University of Pennsylvania Press. Sarianidi, V.I. 0987) South-West Asia: Migrations, the Aryans and Zoroastrians. Information Bulletin of the International Association for the Study of the Cultures of Central Asia (Moscow) 13: 44-56.

Sarianidi, V.I. 0994) Temples of bronze Age Margiana : Traditions of ritual architecture Antiquity 68:388-97.

Sastri, B.N.(ed) 0952) The Wealth of India: Raw Materials. Vol.3. New Delhi: Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. SBE 0879-1910) Sacred Books of the East, 0879-1910) 50 vols.

(Gen.ed.: F.Max Muller) (Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass Reprint, 1988).

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