Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Tradition, Veda and Law
- I Understanding South Asian Cultural Production: In Search of a New Historical and Hermeneutic Awareness
- II pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction
- III Being Good is Being vaidika: On the Genesis of a Normative Criterion in the Mānavadharmaśāstra
- IV na mlecchabhāṣāṃ śikṣeta: On the Authority of Speech and the Modes of Social Distinction through the Medium of Language
- V Punishing in Public: Imposing Moral Self-Dominance in Normative Sanskrit Sources
III - Being Good is Being vaidika: On the Genesis of a Normative Criterion in the Mānavadharmaśāstra
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Tradition, Veda and Law
- I Understanding South Asian Cultural Production: In Search of a New Historical and Hermeneutic Awareness
- II pāṣaṇḍin, vaitaṇḍika, vedanindaka and nāstika: On Criticism, Dissenters and Polemics and the South Asian Struggle for the Semiotic Primacy of Veridiction
- III Being Good is Being vaidika: On the Genesis of a Normative Criterion in the Mānavadharmaśāstra
- IV na mlecchabhāṣāṃ śikṣeta: On the Authority of Speech and the Modes of Social Distinction through the Medium of Language
- V Punishing in Public: Imposing Moral Self-Dominance in Normative Sanskrit Sources
Summary
In the Mānavadharmaśātra, the practice of calling upon ‘vedic’ (vaidika) ideal types takes the form of specific and rather innovative use of adjectives. Because of that work, the term vaidika –virtually unknown to the authors of the dharmasūtras– has gained wide use among brahmanical intellectuals, becoming a distinctive semantic taxon. By using the term vaidika as a means of value judgment, the author of Mānavadharmaśātra decreed the positive and normative character of a wide number of practices, customs, beliefs and behaviours.
In this contribution I will provide examples that demonstrate that this use of the term vaidika is an invention of the Mānavadharmaśātra, and further, an invention that served to classify texts, practices and ideas as possessing authority and legitimacy.
The discourse on ‘what is vedic’
As it has been recently said regarding the term dharma (which has to be treated as a signifier of a negotiable semantic field, rather than as a positively defined notion), it is important to reflect upon the cultural and political presuppositions of brahmanic discourse on what is ‘vedic’. Within brahmanical intellectual contexts, starting from the centuries that preceded Aśoka, saying that something is ‘vedic’ –or that ‘it is stated in the Vedas’– was tantamount to saying that it was ‘old’, ‘valuable’, ‘legitimate’, ‘authorized’, ‘appropriate’, or ‘good’. To indicate that something was related to the Vedas was a way of classifying and qualifying it positively.
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- Information
- Tradition, Veda and LawStudies on South Asian Classical Intellectual Traditions, pp. 113 - 132Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011