Purusha Sukta

Rig Veda 10.90 describes a cosmic person, Purusha, sacrificed by the gods, from whose dismembered body the world is made: the moon from his mind, the sun from his eye, the sky from his head, the earth from his feet. It is a creation-by-sacrifice cosmology and it has close parallels elsewhere in Indo-European material, most obviously the Norse account of the world made from Ymir.

The verse that made it consequential is the eleventh and twelfth. Asked how the person was divided, the hymn answers that the brahmin was his mouth, the ruler his arms, the producer his thighs, and the servant his feet. This is the earliest appearance in Indian literature of the four varnas as a set, and it presents them as an aspect of the structure of the cosmos rather than as a human arrangement.

That single verse has been cited in defence of the caste order for two and a half millennia, and cited against it, reformers including Dayananda Saraswati and later Ambedkarite writers have read it as descriptive of function rather than birth, or rejected the hymn's authority outright, and Ambedkar's own argument was that the passage is late and interpolated.

The scholarly position on that last point is not merely convenient. Book 10 of the Rig Veda is generally regarded as among the latest material in the collection on linguistic and stylistic grounds, and this hymn is often treated as late even within Book 10. That is a judgement made on philological grounds and reached independently of the political argument, but it lands squarely in the middle of it.

Reading it only for the caste verse misses what the composition is for.

It is, structurally, a hymn about sacrifice as the mechanism of creation. The gods perform a sacrifice using Purusha as the offering, and from that act everything proceeds, including, in a characteristic Vedic turn, the sacrifice itself and the verses used in it. The hymn describes the ritual as generating the components of the ritual, which is a self-referential move the Brahmana literature would spend centuries elaborating.

It also states a proportion that later Vedanta took very seriously: three quarters of Purusha is beyond, in the immortal, and one quarter is everything that exists here. That the manifest world is a fraction of what there is becomes a load-bearing idea in the Upanishads.

The hymn is recited in a great many contexts today, temple worship, the consecration of images, domestic ritual, and it is one of the most widely used Vedic texts in living practice. Its recitation in those contexts is not usually accompanied by attention to the caste verse.

Versions of the hymn also appear in the Yajur Veda and elsewhere with additional verses beyond the sixteen stanzas of the Rig Vedic text, the added material generally more explicitly theistic than the core, so a quotation attributed simply to the Rig Veda sometimes comes from a later recension not actually found there.

The Indo-European comparison is worth a word too. The dismemberment of a primordial being to make the world appears in the Norse account of Ymir and in scattered Iranian material, and comparative mythologists have treated it as a shared inheritance. The resemblance establishes a common pattern rather than a common text.