A Precious Tradition

UNESCO has recently proclaimed cultural expressions from 28 countries, from Vanuatu to Brazil, one from each, as masterpieces of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity. 

They include India’s tradition of Vedic chanting.

The UNESCO statement says:The Vedas comprise a vast body of sanskrit poetry, philosophical dialogue and thought, myth and ritual incantations brought to India by the Aryans over 3500 years ago. Regarded by the Hindus as the ultimate source of knowledge and the sacred foundation of their religion  and culture, the Vedas embody one of the world’s oldest surviving cultural traditions.      

“Expressed in elegant Vedic language, the ancestor of classical Sanskrit, the verses of the Veda were traditionally chanted during sacred rituals and ceremonies and recited daily in the Vedic communities. Although the Vedic texts were recorded in writing some 15 centuries ago for reference purposes, their principal means of transmission remain oral to the present day.
“The outstanding value of the Vedic tradition lies not only in the rich content of its oral literature but also in the unique and ingenious techniques employed by the Brahmin priests in preserving the texts over three and half millennia. The complex recitation technique, requiring rigorous training from childhood, is based on a specific pronunciation of each letter, tonal accents and specific speech combinations to ensure that the sound in each word remains unchanged.”
We do not subscribe to the Aryan invasion theory reflected in the UNESCO statement that the Vedas were brought to India by immigrant Aryans from outside nor we need accept the age of the Vedas to be 3500 years, but we do appreciate the UNESCO’s recognition of the value of the Vedic lore as a significant living heritage that deserves preservation.

UNESCO refers to the complex recitation technique of the Vedic lore.  What is it?

The memorizing of the Vedas is being done in India not in a haphazard way.  In fact a very special system of memorizing and singing the hymns has been evolved, measuring every syllable and fixing its place.  There are still about two thousand chanters who can recite the Vedas exactly as it was done five thousand years ago.  The number of singers is particularly large in Andhra Pradesh, and there are seven different methods of singing, and all the seven coincide ensuring freedom from error.

To illustrate the intricacy and rigour of the process we can see what the last method called ganapatha means.  There the singer first pronounces the first syllable, then the second syllable, then he goes to the first syllable and the second, and then pronounces the third, then he goes to the second, and then the first, and then pronounces the second, third and fourth, and goes to the third, and second and first, and so on until he comes to the end of a verse.  Thus each mantra/verse takes a lot of time to recite.  A simple verse like agnim ile purohitam yagnasya devamritvijam hotaram ratnadhatamam takes atleast fifteen minutes, and it is not a prose recitation, but a chanting, a beautiful, musical chanting.

The UNESCO proclamations entail the commitment of states to implement plans to promote and safeguard the inscribed masterpieces.  It will be a great service of the Indian State to the country if it joins whole heartedly in the implementation of the plans for the preservation and continuance of the chanting of the hymns of the Vedic Rishis who, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, “may not have yoked the lightning to their chariots, nor weighed sun and star, nor materialised all the destructive forces in Nature to aid them in massacre and domination, but…had measured and fathomed all the heavens and earths within us; … had cast their plummet into the inconscient and the subconscient and the superconscient; … had read the riddle of death and found the secret of immortality…”

Courtesy, ‘Sri Aurobindo’s Action’ from the Editor’s Desk.tc "A PRECIOUS TRADITION"