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214 20 Orality, Memory, and Power Vedic Scriptures and Brahmanical Hegemony in India Patrick Olivelle Over the past several decades we have seen a shift in the academic study of religion from phenomenological descriptions and analyses of beliefs and rituals to the investigations of the social, political, and economic underpinnings and ramifications of religious practices and institutions. The new Institute for Signifying Scriptures (ISS) at the Claremont Graduate University is directed at investigating precisely such sociopolitical dimensions of “scriptures” cross-culturally. This essay focuses on how social prestige and political power are related to the production, transmission, and preservation of scriptures in India within the priestly class of Brahmins. Although limited in scope, I hope some of the insights from this necessarily brief inquiry will have cross-cultural applications, especially in such scripture-dominated traditions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where scholars too often take “scriptures” as a given to be described rather than as a problem requiring investigation. William Graham, in his excellent article on “Scripture” in Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion, characterized scripture as a relational concept: “A text becomes ‘scripture’ in living, subjective relationship to persons and to historical tradition. No text . . . is sacred or authoritative in isolation from a community.”1 We must imagine such a community as one that accepts the sacred and authoritative nature of its scriptures, and as one that reads, reflects on, and celebrates its scriptures both privately and publicly. Such a definition is most easily applicable to the Judeo-Christian traditions, although even there one may question this communitarian ideal of “scriptures.” In the case of the central Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, however, it is hard to imagine such a community, at least one that includes all who are or who have been named “Hindu.”2 The Vedas were produced by a small, elite, and exclusively male priestly group, the Brahmins. They were memorized and handed down orally within the male Brahmanical community.3 For a millennium or more they were not written down, and they were not divulged to the broader “community” of Hindus, especially all women and also the males of subaltern and marginalized groups, such as the Śūdras, which together comprised perhaps 95 percent of all so-called Hindus at any given time in history. As Wimbush has remarked,4 to gain a fuller understanding of “scriptures” we have to go beyond Orality, Memory, and Power 215 relationships and communities and look at the sociopolitical reality underlying the manufacture and transmission of these oral texts and their assumption of scriptural status. Without a written text as an external object theoretically available to anyone who can buy or steal a copy, the only existence of the Vedas was within the memory of educated Brahmins, traditionally called śiṣṭa, a special cultural elite. With the transmission limited to students who are properly initiated, the Vedic scriptures were not a presence to the rest of the community except when they were ceremonially recited in public rituals. Even there the subalterns were excluded; one text calls for the pouring of molten lac in the ears of a Śūdra who dares to listen to the Veda when it is being recited.5 The possession of this sacred and secret knowledge made the Brahmins a privileged community. This is a textbook example of “knowledge as power”; indeed the very term “Veda” and the term vidyā, also used as a synonym of Veda, simply means knowledge. The exclusive possession of this knowledge-scripture was at the root of Brahmanical claims to power and prestige within society. The famous law book of Manu (circa second century CE), which is intent on guarding the privileges of Brahmins, uses this very argument for the superiority of this group over other segments of the population: “Because he arose from the loftiest part of the body, because he is the eldest, and because he retains the Veda, the Brahmin is by Law the lord of this whole creation” (Manu 1.93). A millennium or more before Manu, the cosmogonic hymn of the Ṛg-veda (10.90) had already presented the social structure of caste as a natural phenomenon origination from the very nature of the creative process. The Brahmin arose from the mouth, that is, “the loftiest part,” of the primeval cosmic being, whereas the royalty arose from the arms, the commoners from the loins, and the servile classes, the subalterns, from the feet. The mouth is here clearly associated with sacred speech contained in the Vedas. Not only...

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