The beginnings: the travelling Veda

A new interest in isolated pockets of surviving Vedic ritualism in South India has given rise in recent decades to a ritual revivalism. Notwithstanding cases of reconstruction and innovation in its regional variations, it testifies to the sustained power and appeal of the ritual tradition that emerged roughly three millennia ago in the Northern part of the Indian subcontinent. In the centuries that followed, it spread east and south with migrant Brahmin communities who developed varied regional cultures of ritual performance for it. All of them referred back to essentially o ne single textual tradition, preserved thanks to partially shared, sophisticated, and regular memory-cum-performance practices engaging organized collectives of individuals, for whom the preservation of the Veda remained a duty as well as a principle of social identification and self-assertion. Several centuries later, the regional varieties of Vedic ritual tradition came to coexist with and influence the new forms of belief and practice that we collectively refer to as Hindu. Before that, close to the appearance of Buddhism in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent towards the 6th and 5th centuries BC, the already rich textual heritage of the Veda emerged as a systematized canonical collection of religious texts rearranged for ritual use. Most of them had been composed many centuries earlier, and continued to be transmitted through memory-cum-performance practices over a period of several centuries. All that accompanied a slow movement towards the east and south of the people who, in the Veda, call themselves arya, or ‘the noble ones’. Their clans formed and changed alliances, fought among themselves as well as against others, with whom they also formed alliances in a process of a growing cultural synthesis. The Vedic canon, internally complex and multiplied, testifies to a religion which modern scholarship chose to name either ‘Vedism’ or ‘Vedic Hinduism’, which preceded post-Vedic Brahmanism and the later developed set of traditions labelled Hinduism.