Words for “Sound” and Concepts of the Sonic in Early India, I: Vedic Prose Texts

Abstract

It has long been customary in Indology to frame mantras in terms of ritual “speech, word” (vāc), particularly as embodied by the divine goddess Speech. As Padoux (1963; 1989) has shown, the framing of mantra as vāc aligns well with traditional conceptions in Vedic and Tantric texts. Spurred on by sound studies, sensory studies, and aesthetic approaches to the study of religion, some recent scholarship has opted instead to frame mantras instead in terms of sound (Staal 1986ab, Beck 1993, Wilke-Moebus 2011, Moore Gerety 2015, Gerety 2016, 2021ab). Yet the category of sound in academic scholarship remains mostly uncorrelated with words and concepts related to sound in various registers of Sanskrit. Inaugurating a series of investigations on this theme under the auspices of the ERC-funded MANTRAMS project, this paper will test the soundness of a sonic framing by examining words for “sound” and concepts of the sonic in India’s oldest surviving Sanskrit prose texts, the Vedic Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas. Relevant keywords, some of which became central to later Indian philosophy, linguistics, and religious speculation, include: nāda, dhvani, rava, śabda, svara, etc. Particular attention will be paid to how the soundscapes evoked by these terms overlap with the soundscapes of Vedic ritual, with its many technical terms for the sounds of ritual speech.