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Chapter 5 The Vedic “Other” Spoilers of Success The doubleness will become an extensive world view applicable not only to all persons in the universe of friends and enemies, but to all objects and places. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain I have come intensely powerful, with the force of Višvakarma; I claim your minds, your vows, your counsel in war. Rg Veda 10.166.4, to one’s enemies 117 Imagine for a moment a Vedic householder who has just built a new chariot . He has carefully blessed each part of the vehicle with mantras, circumambulated the local sacred pond, and drives it to the assembly hall. There, before entering the hall, he utters imprecations against his enemies, wishing that they be trampled underfoot “like frogs underwater.” How would a scholar describe this scene? This rite (AGS 2.6), among many others, has been included, for better or worse, in “nonsolemn” rites. Those involve, among other things, the recitation of Rg Vedic hymns celebrating the destruction of one’s enemies, using graphic images such as the one above—adversaries being trampled under one’s feet “like frogs underwater.” Rites and hymns that involve the destruction of enemies are deeply problematic for any number of reasons, not least of which is their classification under the term magical sorcery. The term implies a lack of richness of imagination—the sheer manipulation of the universe for one’s own personal, and by implication, nonsocial ends. Rites involving enemies are a kind of extreme case of the more general problem with magic in India. Magic takes a role in the problematic evolutionary perspective that the traditional Indological description of the early Vedic period implies: the move from the “solemn” to the “nonsolemn ,” from the “domestic” rites to the “magical and/or popular.” In so far as it describes a world that is not rich in personal, social, and political experience, but only rich in manipulation, the term magic deprives the image of its resonance in early Vedic thought. Yet even these “enemyoriented ” texts are part of the Vedic šakhas, and as such their interpretations actually play a role in the cultural conceptions of place, time, and person and in how such conceptions changed in response to new ritual circumstances. Indeed it is only if we take this notion of branch seriously that we can develop any kind of serious access to the intellectual operation that went into the dangerous stranger in the Vedic period. Yet there are subtleties to the Vedic understanding of enemies that can help us build an intriguing new intellectual history, one that shows the idea of the enemy being directly related to the cultural construction of vulnerability, of being open to danger. I want to show through small interpretive histories of mantra that enemies—the image of the enemy—is associated, metonymically, with particular ritual moments. This lens gives us another perspective, whereby we can see the ways in which imagining the enemy is a process integrally tied up with points of socioritual vulnerability and the ways in which these points change over time. The idea of the enemy is as complex as the Vedic world itself. In the Rg Veda, the word šatru is used more than eighty times and tends to be used to praise the martial deeds of Indra and the Maruts in vanquishing their foes. (RV 1.39.4 and 1.33.13 are good typical examples.) As Grassmann notes, the word tends to refer to someone who is equal in strength, a matched adversary.1 So, too, an enemy can be something that is an adversary or simply an obstruction. In Rg Veda 32.4, for instance, Indra destroys the first born of the clouds, leaving no enemy to oppose him. This could mean either his enemy, Vrtra, or it could mean that in scattering the clouds, there is nothing left to obscure the atmosphere. Similarly, the word amitra, literally “a nonfriend,” is frequently used (for example, RV 1.100.3; 1.131.7) in the description of these divine exploits. In a more personal vein, the term risa (riša), from the root ris, “to tear,” also means an enemy in the sense of an injurer, someone who tears off, or devours. So, too, rišadas is someone who devours or destroys enemies (also see RV 1.39.4). Yet šatru and related terms are only one of several ideas about the other in Vedic worlds. The arya-dasa (noble/slave) or...

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