In the Mānavadharmaśātra, the practice of calling upon ‘vedic’ (vaidika) ideal types takes the form of specific and rather innovative use of adjectives. Because of that work, the term vaidika –virtually unknown to the authors of the dharmasūtras– has gained wide use among brahmanical intellectuals, becoming a distinctive semantic taxon. By using the term vaidika as a means of value judgment, the author of Mānavadharmaśātra decreed the positive and normative character of a wide number of practices, customs, beliefs and behaviours.

In this contribution I will provide examples that demonstrate that this use of the term vaidika is an invention of the Mānavadharmaśātra, and further, an invention that served to classify texts, practices and ideas as possessing authority and legitimacy.

The discourse on ‘what is vedic’

As it has been recently said regarding the term dharma (which has to be treated as a signifier of a negotiable semantic field, rather than as a positively defined notion), it is important to reflect upon the cultural and political presuppositions of brahmanic discourse on what is ‘vedic’. Within brahmanical intellectual contexts, starting from the centuries that preceded Aśoka, saying that something is ‘vedic’ –or that ‘it is stated in the Vedas’– was tantamount to saying that it was ‘old’, ‘valuable’, ‘legitimate’, ‘authorized’, ‘appropriate’, or ‘good’. To indicate that something was related to the Vedas was a way of classifying and qualifying it positively.