Stephanie Jamison

The Rig Veda stands between two literary worlds: it is both the inheritor of the Indo-European tradition of intricate oral praise poetry, as seen also, for example, in the victory odes of the archaic Greek poet Pindar, and it is the precursor in style and poetic attitude of the elaborate later Indic court poetry known as kavya, whose flowering came only in the first millenium of the Common Era, some two millennia after the likely composition of the hymns of the Rig Veda. These lectures argue ...