Ever since the very first attempt by Baron Sainte-Croix and his Ezour Vedam, nearly all following projects to publish the Veda in print were fraught with emotion and tension. The act of publishing the Veda suggested a disclosure but what actually was, or was imagined to be, disclosed could differ widely, depending on who published it. The gesture of publishing either the allegedly lost or sacred or philologically-mastered Veda entailed articulating a concept of what the Veda actually was. The introduction to Müller's imperial-cum-philological Veda ran for dozens of pages, growing in number in succeeding volumes and the second edition. Other editors of the Ṛgveda felt less self-orientated but more inclined to include the printing of the Veda into the network of relationships of early communal, regional, or national symbolism.

All through the late 18th and 19th centuries, with their discovery of mechanized printing, the marginal niche of the printed Veda filled up slowly and with different ideas in mind of those who ventured to publish in print either the imagined or the lost, philological, or imperial Veda—the truly oral or national Veda. In each of these cases, the same thing might look quite different, while reflecting different presuppositions and distinct expectations of variously targeted audiences putting print to different conceptual uses. Only some analogies concerning the profound changes effected by print since the 16th century, to the understanding of what the Bible was when it domesticated itself in the minds of the nineteenth-century-reader as exclusively ‘the Book’, can be—with due caution—resorted to, when trying to assess the changes in how the nature of the Veda was understood with the appearance of early Indian editions of Vedic texts.