Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

ROBERTO CALASSO- An Italian On Indian Vedic Words

Posted : December 28, 2005 at 10:30 pm [IST]

Roberto Calasso is Italian and has written about Indian mythology. He has to his credit many books. I found some portion of his article- ‘THE NEED FOR VEDIC WORDS’ in ‘Telegraph’ really very interesting.

“India made its entry in my life very early, before I was twenty, as a shocking meteor. This happened when I read for the first time the early Upanisads, the Chandogya Upanisad and the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, and the Bhagavad Gita. At the time I was inclined to think that the sharpest point reached by thought was to be found in Greece, somewhere between Parmenides and Plato. And the last great European philosopher, Martin Heidegger, encouraged us to believe that the natural language of thought was the Greek of the pre-Socratics. But the Upanisads challenged all this. Those texts weren’t philosophy in the Western sense. But they had an essential point in common with the fragments of the pre-Socratics: they aimed at knowledge - and nothing else but knowledge. Indeed, in India, starting from the very word “veda”, knowledge seemed to be the hinge on which everything revolved: not only thought, but life itself.”

Why has an Italian writer of the last decades of the 20th century felt the need to refer to rita, an obscure Vedic word, when talking about the Congress of Vienna and Talleyrand? In dealing with the political masterpiece of Talleyrand, which was to invent and to implement a new sense of the word legitimacy, I wanted to go back to its origin. And my search didn’t stop until I got to the notion of rita. No Latin, no Greek word was a comparable help. Because ‘legitimacy’ is only a timid and modern way of referring to something, which must be at the same time a law and an order. And only rita is a word which is capable of conflating these two meanings. And that is not all. One of the greatest Indologists of the last century, Heinrich Luders, spent some decades working on a big work called Varuna, which he left unfinished. One of the major points of the book is the analysis of the word rita, which comes to the conclusion that the first meaning of the word is not ‘order’ but ‘truth’. This theory of Luders was, for a while, hotly discussed by Indologists, but what seems by now more plausible is that both Luders and some of his opponents were right, in so far as the word rita refers to a frame of thought for which the notion of truth and order simply cannot be divided, while on the other hand, in the course of time, they split and the word rita itself was superseded by two other words: satya for ‘truth’ and dharma for ‘law’ and ‘order’.

Now, you see already what is appearing in front of us: going back from the intensely modern and technical word ‘legitimacy’ we are getting into a very ancient area where the meanings law, order and truth mingle in a single Sanskrit word: rita. And my point is that I had to reach that obscure and fascinating area if I wanted to understand the origin of our everyday notion of legitimacy. It was not the whim and eccentricity of a Western writer of today, which made me refer to this word.

Now, one of the reasons why I believe that Talleyrand was such an admirable politician and diplomat is that he was the one who managed to give a new meaning to the word ‘legitimacy’, where a subtle resonance of the meaning of rita (of which, by the way, he couldn’t possibly know anything) was still perceivable. And, after all, precisely to that word European history owes the fact that it could keep a precarious balance for a hundred years, until it collapsed in August 1914. And if there is a moment in which the word ‘legitimacy’ would urgently require to be used, finding new meanings and applications, now that the frame of international law is obviously and, possibly, forever shattered, well that moment is exactly today. So you see how easily, and how quickly, one can skip from the destiny of a man who was the quintessence of the West to a seminal Vedic word and back. It is not out of goodwill or - worse - humanitarianism that the West should look to India or India to the West, but in order to understand thoroughly what is happening under our eyes - and possibly referring to thoughts which were first formulated and practised thousands of years ago.

I don’t know why some of our politicians are so dead against our cultural supremacy.

- Indra

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