H-6: BOOKS

Vedas

• There are four Vedas – the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda,  and Atharvaveda. 
• The oldest Veda is the Rigveda, composed about 3500 years ago. The Rigveda includes more than a thousand hymns (भजन), or “well-said”. It is in old or Vedic Sanskrit.

• These hymns are in praise of various gods and goddesses. Three gods are especially important: Agni, the god of fire; Indra, a warrior god; and Soma, a plant from which a special drink was prepared. 
• These hymns were composed by sages (ऋषि). Priests taught students to recite and memorize each syllable, word, and sentence, bit by bit, with great care.
• The Rigveda was recited and heard rather than read. It was written down several centuries after it was first composed, and printed less than 200 years ago. 
• Some of the hymns in the Rigveda are in the form of dialogues. A part of one such hymn, a dialogue between a sage named Vishvamitra, and two rivers, (Beas and Sutlej) that were worshipped as goddesses. 
• There are also many prayers in the Rigveda for cattle, children (especially sons), and horses.
• Some of the words used to describe people found in the Rigveda:
• the priests, sometimes called brahmins, who performed various rituals,
• the rajas
• 2 words were used to describe the people or the community as a whole: jana, which we still use in Hindi and other languages; other was vish. The word vaishya comes from vish
• the people who composed the hymns described themselves as Aryas and called their opponents Dasas or Dasyus. These were people who did not perform sacrifices, and probably spoke different languages. Later, the term dasa (and the feminine dasi) came to mean slave.

Sanskrit and other languages

• Sanskrit is a part of family of languages known as Indo-European. 
• Some Indian languages such as Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri and Sindhi; Asian languages such as Persian and many European languages such as English, French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish belong to this family. They are called a family because they originally had words in common. Take the words ‘matr’ (Sanskrit), ‘ma’ (Hindi) and ‘mother’ (English). Other languages used in the subcontinent belong to different families. 
• For instance, those used in the north-east belong to the Tibeto-Burman family; Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam belong to the Dravidian family; and the languages spoken in Jharkhand and parts of central India belong to the Austro-Asiatic family.