The fluid textuality in the Vedic hymns: can we re-write them?

Empire making was made possible through the realm of print culture. Not only was the technology transferred, but so were the socially ascribed characteristics of print. The East India Company Orientalists were operating within the ideology of eighteenth century print culture that associated print with truth, assumed that the technology of print had the power to transform a pre-modern, Indian scribal culture into western modernity.

The following extracts from Max Mueller’s translations of the Vedic texts make that clear; he refers to the numerous manuscripts that he had to collate in order to arrive at the final, perfect text. His desire is to do away with all spurious elements and subsequently write the edited, corrected text.

VEDIC HYMNS

PART I

HYMNS TO THE MARUTS, RUDRA, VÂYU, AND VÂTA

Translated by

F. MAX MÜLLER

Clarendon: Oxford University Press

[1891]

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST EDITION.

With the MSS. then accessible in the principal libraries of Europe, a tolerably correct text of the Samhitâ might have been published, and these ancient relics of a primitive religion might have been at least partially deciphered and translated in the same way in which ancient inscriptions are deciphered and translated, viz. by a careful collection of all grammatical forms, and by a complete intercomparison of all passages in which the same words and the same phrases occur. When I resolved to devote my leisure to a critical edition of the text and commentary of the Rig-veda rather than to an independent study of that text, it was chiefly from a conviction that the traditional interpretation of the Rig-veda, as embodied in the commentary of Sâyana and other works of a similar character, could not be neglected with impunity, and that sooner or later a complete edition of these works would be recognised as a necessity.

…

The Veda, I feel convinced, will occupy scholars for centuries to come, and will take and maintain for ever its position as the most ancient of books in the library of mankind. Such a book, and the commentary of such a book, should be edited once for all; and unless some unexpected discovery is made of more ancient MSS., I do not anticipate that any future Bekker or Dindorf will find much to glean for a new edition of Sâyana, or that the text, as restored by me from a collation of the best MSS. accessible in Europe, will ever be materially shaken.