Jan E. M. Houben and Julieta Rotaru, "Vedic Myths and Rituals" (Dev Publishers, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Jan E. M. Houben and Julieta Rotaru, Vedic Myths and Rituals (Dev Publishers, 2025)"

New Books Network – Indian Religions
Host: Dr. Raj Balkaran
Guests: Professor Jan E. M. Houben & Dr. Julieta Rotaru
Date: September 11, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the newly published volume Vedic Myths and Rituals, co-edited by Prof. Jan E. M. Houben and Dr. Julieta Rotaru of Paris University. The discussion centers on the intricate relationship between myth and ritual within the Vedic tradition, theoretical approaches toward these ancient practices, and the academic and institutional efforts underpinning their research. Both guests provide insights into the genesis of the book, the evolution of Vedic studies, the significance of Atharva Veda, and future directions for scholarship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Genesis and Purpose of the Book

• Prof. Houben recounts his personal journey from classical studies in Greek and Latin to Sanskrit and immersive fieldwork in India, including his early research and documentation of Vedic rituals (02:19).
• The book emerges from work initiated at a 2009 symposium on the interplay of myth and ritual and revisits papers from that gathering with a refreshed theoretical lens and new contributions.

2. The Relationship Between Myth and Ritual

• The "fascinating interplay" between Vedic myths and rituals is central to the volume (01:27).
• Two longstanding theoretical approaches:
  • Myth drives ritual: Rituals as reenactments of foundational myths, a 19th-century idea.
  • Ritual as primary: Asserting rituals precede and give rise to myths—embedded in indigenous theories like Mimamsa.
• Houben highlights the significance of both perspectives and the need for a comprehensive framework that does not lose sight of meaning within structural analysis (05:25).

"Just a simple enumeration of ritual details does not contribute much to understanding the ritual...some implicit or explicit theory is required."
—Prof. Jan Houben (03:54)

3. Theoretical Innovations: From Structuralism to Functionalism

• Critique of Fritz Staal's "meaningless ritual" model: Rituals as pure structure, devoid of meaning.
• Introduction of Roy Rappaport’s model, integrating structure and meaning using ideas from anthropology, particularly in the analysis of ritual self-reference and multifunctionality (09:50).
• Application of the model to both household (guhya) and Vedic rituals for a holistic approach (15:50).
• Importance of distinguishing canonical and performative dimensions in ritual analysis.

"Ritual must have a meaning, otherwise it cannot even function."
—Prof. Jan Houben (16:38)

4. Institutional and Historical Context

• Dr. Julieta Rotaru details the development of Sanskrit and Indological studies in Romania, especially her efforts in institutionalizing Sanskrit teaching at the University of Bucharest and in founding the Center for Eurasiatic and Afro-Asiatic Studies (22:46).
• Highlights from Bucharest’s vibrant conference scene (2008-2011), innovative summer schools, and manuscriptology courses that brought together leading global Vedic scholars and offered pioneering manuscript training in Europe.
• The collaborative nature and Pune "conspiracy"—the work’s many contributors share ties to Pune and the institutions there (Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Deccan College, and others) (40:00).

5. Focus on the Atharva Veda

• Emphasis on Atharva Veda’s unique place among the Vedas as the "performance par excellence" (Kaland, cited by Rotaru, 44:00).
• The centrality of performance and the close relationship between mantra and action in Atharvavedic rituals.
• Many authors in the volume are specialists in Atharva Veda and its ritual manuals, offering new perspectives and analyses.

"The connection between the text of the Atharva Veda Samhita and the action...is so eloquent, it's so explicit. So this is what I wanted to underline. It’s so full of meanings."
—Dr. Julieta Rotaru (44:31)

6. The Book’s Structure and New Contributions

• The current volume re-edits and updates earlier conference proceedings, adding a new introduction, theoretical dialogue, a posthumous paper by Deepak Bhattacharya, and additional context (13:50, 22:46).
• Notable for integrating theory and descriptive ritual studies and drawing connections across international scholarly traditions.

7. The Role of Performance, Orality, and Canonical Texts

• Upcoming projects will include further documentation and publication of Vedic ritual recitations and performances, highlighting their importance for understanding living ritual traditions.
• The dynamic between orality and writing in the transmission of Vedic knowledge is a key area of ongoing and future research (53:40–54:38).

"...the recitation itself is the performance of the text. So it is hardly possible to distinguish ritual and the story. Because if you recite the story and that is the ritual, then the story is the ritual."
—Prof. Jan Houben (50:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Theoretical Intervention:
  "It seems incommensurate to one who would spend their life studying such a tradition...It renders his own work meaningless if the object of his work is meaningless. But nevertheless, it's, I think, laudable to take serious tradition."
  —Host Dr. Raj Balkaran (20:40)

• On the Evolution of Indology in Romania:
  "I'm the one who reintroduced the study and teaching of Sanskrit at the University of Bucharest...because I'm a person of institutions. I believe in institutions and I wanted to have this formal teaching and Sanskrit tradition in my country."
  —Dr. Julieta Rotaru (24:15)

• On the Unity of the Volume:
  "The unity, a sort of Pune conspiracy people. And the second is Atharva Veda because most of the scholars there deal with Atharva Veda."
  —Dr. Julieta Rotaru (40:02)

• On Future Scholarship:
  "Otherwise it becomes all dry text. In fact, the recitation itself is the performance of the text... extremely important not to have a broad enough model, otherwise you will not see what is going on."
  —Prof. Jan Houben (50:12)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------| | 01:27 | Introduction of guests and the book | | 02:19 | Prof. Houben’s scholarly journey & book’s genesis | | 05:25 | Theories of myth-ritual relationship | | 09:50 | Rapaport’s theory and contemporary debates | | 15:11 | The book as an intervention in ritual theory | | 22:46 | Dr. Rotaru on institutional context in Romania | | 35:09 | Inclusion of Vedic pundits, recitation in training| | 40:00 | The “Pune connection” and Atharva Veda focus | | 44:00 | Performance and meaning in Atharva Veda | | 49:07 | Future research/publications on orality and ritual| | 53:40 | Orality, performance, and illustrations in ritual | | 56:43 | Farewell and outro |

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Conclusion and Future Directions

• The volume Vedic Myths and Rituals presents a nuanced, theoretically rich, and institutionally grounded exploration of Vedic practices, aiming to reconcile structural and functional accounts of ritual.
• Both editors are engaged in ongoing scholarly activities, including editing further proceedings (e.g., Paris 2023 International Vedic Workshop) and publishing multi-media ritual documentation.
• The episode highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity, institutional support, and international collaboration in advancing Vedic and comparative religion studies.

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For more details and to access resources mentioned, see the podcast notes for links to institutional enterprises and Prof. Houben’s Vimeo channel containing rare Vedic ritual recordings.

Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

Hello and welcome back to the New Books and Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host Dr. Raj Balkor and more. And more importantly, I have the double delight of welcoming to the podcast today Dr. Giulieta Rotaro and Professor Jan Hooman, both of Paris University, both co editors of a really fun, fascinating, brand new publication called Vedic Myths and Rituals. It's not a misnomer, it's about Vedic myths and rituals and more importantly, the fascinating interplay between the two. Welcome both to the podcast.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

Thank you. Thank you so much.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Welcome. Thank you for welcoming us in your beautiful podcast system.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

Yes, yes, our pleasure. So tell us a little bit about the, you know, the genesis, the media.

[Professor Jan Huban]

If I so the book, of course it will not be seen, but the book Vedic Myths and Rituals has indeed a genesis. Well, personally it goes back to my study of Vedic rituals since the 80s and 90s. So being first interested in Greek and Latin at secondary school, I decided to study another classical language at university and that was Sanskrit. So in Sanskrit I studied the Paninian grammar and philosophy of language. But then I came to Vedic texts and ritual and my master thesis was about the Pravagya ritual. That thesis appeared in 91 in book form in Delhi. And only after that book was published, I could see in India. I could come to India more regularly and be present at several extensive authentic Vedic rituals being performed there. And there also I could stay for some time in Vedic ashrams with the young Veda students. And so, on the base of my filming of these Vedic rituals, I could again make a one hour video film of the Vedic Pravargya, which I have published in VHS format in 1999. And now two parts of this film are now online in Female Vedic ritual Dedicated showcase and when we study Vedic ritual, there is one problem which always comes up, and that is the the relationship between the detailed descriptive study of rituals and also of myths, and then the general theories of ritual and myth. Just a simple enumeration of ritual details does not contribute much to understanding the ritual. You get lost in all the details. But in order to perceive a structure in the mass of details, some implicit or explicit theory is required. So From Myth to Ritual was our subtitle of a special section on Euro Asiatic and Afro Asiatic studies in Bucharest in 2009, a big symposium. And the relation between myth and ritual is one of those important theoretical problems with which students of Vedic myth and ritual are unavoidably confronted. So in Our section of 2009, several contributions, and later on the articles in the Proceedings that appeared in 2010, they had both a descriptive and a theoretical dimension. And this From Myth to Ritual you can in fact put a question mark behind it, because we can equally say from ritual to myth. And it depends on the theoretical approach.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

So.

[Professor Jan Huban]

We can see that many take a ritual to be basically a reenactment of some foundational mythology. And this has also been a very widespread theory since the end of the 19th century, that all rituals are somehow reenactments of some old myth. And the task of the scholar who wants to understand ritual is then to identify the underlying myth. And a very different approach also since the 19th century and end of the 19th century, emphasizes that rituals are rather. That the myths are rather secondary, the ritual as a structure, as almost like a grammar of ritual you can make. The ritual is primary and the myth is secondary. So it is remarkably that this is in fact the theory of mimamsa, the mimasa approach to Vedic ritual, which says that the ritual act prescribed in the prescription in the vidhi is primary and the myth is merely ahthavada. So is the Mima's approach to say that myth is merely ahtavara. But for the Western scholars, these beautiful narrative Myths were often much more fascinating than the dry ritual structure. But still there have been scholars. And as I mentioned, Fritz Stahl, who was also a Vedic scholar, scholar of Vedic ritual. But he also proposed a theory that rituals have no meaning at all, but you should just study the structure like a grammar, like the grammar of ritual. And that suffices. And so in my own contribution in that time, 2009, I discussed several theories relevant for Vedic ritual and including the one of style. But I found that another one which was recently proposed, the one by Roy Rapaport, is in fact more comprehensive and thus give a place to meaning. Although it also is open to the formal aspect of just describing the ritual episode by episode, it also has function for the meanings in the ritual. So this theory of Rappaport is in some sense more comprehensive than the one by style, which is a little minimalistic. So, taking that theory as a starting point, I had now recently made a new introduction to our contributions of 2009 and started a kind of dialogue between the theory of describing the ritual and the my and then the various contributions which are also already there. But we have also added one other contribution in this current volume, and that is a contribution by Professor Deepak Bhattacharya, who lived from 1940 to 2022. And he Great scholar of Atara Veda and about which Giulietta will speak very soon. But he also has, in his own way, he had a very broad paper in which he also proposes gives a dialogue between the ritual elements and the theory. And his perspective especially is the, let's say, the problem of magic, magic in the rituals. So his article deals with various specific rituals and it analyzes the aspect of magic, whether to what extent the magic has any ethical aspects also. So. So here is the overview of that dialogue between theory and the description of the rituals and myths. So some of the contributions, for instance, the one by Bahulkar, he takes a specific myth which seems to be reenacted in a ritual. But the similar cases are discussed by Bhattacharya, where we can also say that the myth has been formulated in order to fit in the ritual. So the narrative parts have obviously attracted much attention because of their human nature is always to be more fascinated by narrative passages. And still they make more sense if you place them within the ritual. They have sometimes a function in order to make the ritual more effective. They are like the ingredients of rituals. So the book is therefore partly. They are the articles, the contributions which are already there, but which were a little dispersed in the large proceedings of that conference of 2009 in Bucharest. And partly it is new in the sense that we have the new introduction which proposes this dialogue more explicitly. My own contribution that time contains overview, let's say, since the 19th century, of various theories proposed for dealing with Vedic ritual. And then finally there is the not yet published article of Deepak Bhattacharya, which was not yet published and which is now published here for the first time. And finally there is the postface written by Giulietta, our colleague Julieta. And that concerns the center for Euro Asiatic and Afro Asiatic Studies, seas, which for five years could function very dynamically in Bucharest and which has organized many conferences, including the Vedic Workshop. The International Vedic Workshop of 2011 was organized in Bucharest by this, with the help of or by this CAS of Bucharest. So in this sense that center for Euro Asiatic and Afro Asiatic Studies has contributed significantly to Vedic Studies, but also to other Oriental studies, because it was at some extent a continuation of a center of dedicated to Mirza Eliade and other famous Romanian scholar of Vedic, of Orientalism, let's say, of Yoga, Sanskrit, Vedic studies, etc. So I think this is a very brief overview. From my perspective, it is an the theories which are now developed in the sense as a kind of successor to the Fritz Stahl theory, which is a little too limited. This is a kind of test of how rich this theory is in relation to the various concrete studies of various rituals, including the one I mentioned, also specifically the Shilpasumman's article which deals with the bride, with the yoga interpretation of Kaushika Sutra. So there we see how this theory is very clarifying to distinguish the aspects of the canonical dimension of the ritual. Plus, on the other hand, there is the. The performative dimension, which makes the ritual not just abstract thing, but something which is performed for some reason by some people in a historical context. So I think at this point I will maybe stop and many more aspects are to be told about the book. So I will stop here for the moment. And unless there are still specific questions on these things which I have told.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

Oh no, thank you very much for the overview of the sort of theoretical underpinnings of the work. Just although you mentioned it, certainly in passing, I'd like to sort of underscore for perhaps a less specialist audience, the extent to which this work is an intervention or sort of a redirection of this line of thought. I mean, what is it that if you could wave a wand otherwise. But what is it? What impact do you hope that this work would have in terms of the scholarly understandings of how of the relation of Vedic myth and ritual.

[Professor Jan Huban]

So, yes, so the. Let me say it in this way. The last theory which was comprehensively formulated for Vedic ritual was in fact the one by Fritz Stahl, after which he probably for the sake of discussion, he emphasized the grammatical structure. And so he wrote that book of meaningless ritual rules without meanings with which he could deal with a large aspect of Vedic ritual. But still many scholars, of course, probably it was also his wish to provoke some discussion. So many people started to criticize that some aspect is missing. And a very comprehensive theory, as I told, has been formulated by this Rappaport and who is not very well known. But he integrates that grammatical approach and the meaning approach. So although this Rapaport has used the he based himself on rituals of Papua New guinea, so very far from Indian rituals, still his theory is very appropriate, as I have shown in several articles, to deal in an integrated way with the structure part of the rituals and the meaning part. And the crucial point is that there are moments in the ritual which refer to the ritual itself. So if ritual has no meaning, then it can also not refer to itself. So there is a point where the ritual must have a ritual must have a meaning, otherwise it cannot even function. So that I have demonstrated in some articles. So here is a more detailed application in several rituals which are both the Gukya, the house rituals, the domestic rituals and the Vedic rituals, which have a very different function. So for both types of rituals, this theory is very suitable to clarify issues, otherwise it becomes very murky and you have elements which are very personal that let's say the bride does something with the bridegroom. So there is either you have a very un localized study of rituals or you have overly historic situated one ritual in one concrete moment. So to integrate all these aspects, this theory, I think we see that in this book, this theoretical model is suitable to deal with all these aspects and to give them all a proper place and also to avoid useless discussions about, let's say, elements which seem to be contradictory, but each belongs to another dimension of the ritual. So contradictory or meaningless?

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

Meaningless. Contradictory or meaningless. I read the article you cited of Shilpa Sumant, the bride with the power. It makes no meaning if you don't put it in the Right. Right.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

All right, yeah, but you know, you know, I.

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[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

For those who listen to this podcast, I ask these often purposely naive questions to bring out some of this rich content in a way that will land for a more general readership. And I quite value the extent to which, you know, whether it was being serious or being a provocateur or some combination. Nevertheless, the result was tantamount to many a reduction, if not a dismissal of an extraordinarily rich and ancient living tradition, which seems incommensurate to one who would spend their life studying such a tradition. It renders his own work meaningless if the object of his work is meaningless. But nevertheless, it's, I think, laudable to take serious tradition. We're not operating from emic perspective, but we take serious that this is meaningful to someone for some reason, and we aim to make sense of that from an edict perspective. And I think I don't know the ins and outs of Roy Rapoport's work, but from what I can glean from your introduction and your comments, it seems quite apropos because to me it's quite resonant that he has this bipedal creature of the kind of canonical messages and performative messages or what I think that was Laukika and au laukika. I think of this as the dharmic double helix, poverty and niverty that there's sort of the sociological, cultural elements of ritual that make sense for us in this time and then there's a nod to something beyond a historical horizon and we kind of. We have to. There's an elision or there's kind of you have to change your your focus. And I think, I think it's. It's rich and I think it's in my view, I think this, this this work successfully reclaims the vitality of Vedic ritual without making any intellectual concessions. If anything, what you're doing is you're, I think, on the cusp of more clearly theorizing Vedic ritual. So, yes, thank you for the introduction and those comments, Juliette, we'd love to hear from you. Let's hear some of your voice, some of your work. Anything you'd like to share about the work?

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

Well, as it has been said, this volume, the genesis of this volume is actually a re. Addition. Re editing of former volume, which was published in context of a conference organized in Bucharest, which I will talk about later on. But I have to underline to stress the role of our editor, Deaf Publisher, Dr. Pankaj Jain, who has strived himself to produce this volume and publish it. Right. And presented in the beginning of the World Sanskrit Conference, which just took place in Kathmandu, in Nepal. Right. And I don't know if he is aware, and I would like him to know that actually this volume is in connection with another volume which was published in the beginning of the first World Sanskrit Conference, which was in 1972, held in New Delhi. And with the occasion, well, it was a very historic moment where Ragavan was president of that association, which is nowadays the association which organizes the World Sanskrit Conference, Raghavan, which is famous for his Sanskrit mission, the collection of manuscripts visiting to Pathshalas and places of Sanskrit preservation, Vedic school preservation and so on. So at that time, a team from Pune has produced a volume which was dedicated to this conference taking place in New Delhi. It's about a team from Pune from Tilak Maharashtra, Vidya Beat, and a volume unique per se because it's about Dariela Bhasha text which is preserved nowadays in a Codex Unicus, preserved previously in Tubingen University Library, now in Berlin National Library. Well, the team of editors produced this volume of Dariela Basha, which has been never re. Edited again and never translated. It belongs to the Atharvaveda tradition, which I will speak shortly about. And this team dedicated this volume to the conference taking place in New Delhi. So I was struck by the coincidence of these two things. Of course, Mutatis mutandis. And with all the modesty, our volume of Professor Hub and myself and the contributors cannot tally with that. But there is some connection. One of the editors of this 1972 volume is in our volume, and he is Dr. Srikant Bahulkar, who was my guru in Tilak Maharashtra, Vidya Bit. And now I will come a bit to my formative years. So I'm also a Scholar of Latin. I did my secondary education with Latin eight years, and then I pursued a BA in Classical Philology, Latin and Ancient Greek. Then I specialized in Sanskrit in India, because there is no Sanskrit tradition in my country. I'm Romanian, I'm from Bucharest. And I'm the one who reintroduced the study and teaching of Sanskrit at the University of Bucharest. And together with Professor Huben, we even established or re established or established on the premises of institution. We established a center of, let's say, Oriental Studies, center of Eurasiatic and Afro Asiatic Studies. And well, because I'm a person of institutions, I believe in institutions, I'm a scholar, but my background is I believe in institutions and I wanted to have this formal teaching and Sanskrit tradition in my country. We did all these things and we did it seriously, Professor Jan Huban and I. So what is the idea of this center of Euro Asiatic and Afro Asiatic studies? Well, not all countries in Europe have a Sanskrit tradition, although we had great names, we had great philologists who addressed in their studies Sanskrit as well. One of them is, for instance, 19th century, paramount scholar and polymath, who knew a thousand of languages, from Swedish to all Balkan languages, Slavic languages, of course, Latin, Greek, also Sanskrit. So his name is Bogdan Petrichdeo. And from this tradition, because maybe he's not very well known to our listeners, but he was the role model for another figure who is very well known, Mircea Eliade, the father of the history of religion. And he was the model. So the same polymath model many languages approach to various comparative approach to religions and religious thought. Well, following this tradition of lockdown, Patricia Kuhardo of 19th century, Mirce Eliade, then another name, Cicerone Pogirk, a scholar of Latin and Greek, who established in 1970s during the communist regime, who did not encourage very much, you know, this kind of esoteric thinking. By the way, many books of Renegianon by. By instance were put to. We call it index, means they were not to be shown in the public libraries. And so during this time, in 1970s, this person, Cicerone Pogirk, who was a professor in the university where I studied and where I later on taught, he was a Latin and Greek scholar, an Indo European scholar. And well, he established a center of Oriental Studies, which later one he was the leader of the center, established a library, it had a journal, started publication in various branches, few subjects from India, because there were no specialists in the subject. And later on he decided to remain in. He was a professor in Italy, and later on he decided to remain in Paris. And he died by 2009, almost unknown. He was professor in Bokum University. Well, after this Cicerone Pogir, the legacy of having Oriental Studies, parentheses including Sanskrit, was somehow not doing well. But later on, after the so called revolution, after the fall of the communism in 1989, the idea was retaken and well, an Institute of Oriental Studies was created in Bucharest. This Institute of Oriental Studies tried to add some activities and publication, but not that successful because of adverse conditions here, no good libraries. And later on it was. It disappeared. We have taken Professor Huban and I have developed, together with other colleagues of Oriental Studies, this Center of Eurasiatic and Afro Asiatic Studies, incorporating the library of the center developed in 1970s. So following this tradition for few decades, which I know, in comparison with rest of Europe, it's nothing. But for Bucharest it was a momentum because we, for five years we had intensive activities. We have every year an international conference of great caliber. So greatest Sanskritis from all over the world, like Asco Parpola, who presented his lifetime work in Kerala on the Nambudiri, on the Griha rituals of the Nambudiris. And well, Professor Michael Wietzel has honored us each year, consecutive, five consecutive years, with his presence. Who else? Madhav Deshpande? Yes, from the great grammarian Madhav Deshpande, Johannes Brunkhorst, Johannes Braunfelst, several times came so. Well, all these personalities are listed in our book and we described their contribution, a part of this every year. Professor Jan Huban, myself and Sarah Jurat, who that time was in Leiden, in the Institute of Asiatic Studies, she organized the summer courses, intensive summer courses, which were really intense for 10 days, four different scripts. So it was a manuscriptology, we call it codecology course, in which many, many of the. Nowadays, because I look at the colleagues of my age, I'm talking about years ago, who are now so much advanced in their studies, and they are using different scripts and manuscripts. But that time they were beginners and they came to us, they came in Bucharest. And one more thing I want to stress. That time it was a unique initiative. So I'm talking about 2008-2009-2010-2011. Unique initiative. There was nothing similar in Europe. There were courses of codicology in India, I'm very well aware, because I studied, my formative years are in Pune, you know, I started from my formative years and I ended up here. So I know very well that in India it was possible to have such training, but not in Europe. So what Dr. Sarah Jorat did was unique. And one year, I remember we had a course on poetry and meters and it was Srinant Babat from Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute who taught us Pingalas, the famous Pingala's treatise on metrics. So he was illustrating, giving us the definition from Pingala and then illustration. And it was fantastic and also unique for that time. Nowadays I'm not aware. I'm not aware if such courses are taking place in Europe, but that time we had the initiative and we were, so to say, pioneers.

[Professor Jan Huban]

That one more thing. If I just can add one more thing, Julieta, a very unique thing. We also did innovative that was to invite pundits to recite. And so that it is not only to study from outside, but also to listen and also to their view how they deal with manuscripts and oral tradition. We have also that is also partly online on my Vimeo channel. It's a very beautiful, very instructive and very. To be recommended for beginner student, beginning students of Fidic to hear the recitation of Rig Veda, of Sama Veda and to hear also their explanations.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for. You know. Thank you. I was getting to this, but it's very good.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

No, no, no. So actually that's why I said it was so unique, not only for Bucharest, who. Which has never seen this before. And I'm confident and said we'll never see this, not even in hundred or two hundred years. Bucharest, maybe other centers in Europe. And well, it's a pity that it ended up. If you want to know how it ended up, we did not reveal in our voice volume because it's not the scope of our. Is not our endeavor to complain. And you know, I did, or we did, like Patanjali teaches us in Spaspar, Shahnika and Mahabhasha. No, what he teaches us, there are so many apashabdas, so many faults in the speech. So you cannot. How can you. How can you teach a student showing the upper shabdas, showing the faults? How can you teach the correct speech in such a manner? No, you should concentrate on the correct shabdas. So instead of doing a list of thoughts and mistakes and upper shabdas, you do a list of correct shabdas. And that's what I did. That's what we did. And we moved forward and well, now here we are with the second edition of the. Of this volume, which is an updated edition because as Professor Huben said, he has these Rappaportian lenses going through the articles of the volume. Well, we have the beautiful contribution of Deepak Bhattacharya who in the meanwhile Svargata left us. And I'm very, very happy that we can bring it for the first time which has a sort of consensus or middle position between the two extreme. Which is the first one, Mantras or the ritual, the Yaga, which is the first. And if you go through our volume, you will see a very exciting authors taking position unconsciously because they did not say oh, from the beginning I will have this or that. No, by the way, he thinks that of course mantras were the first and ritual developed later. So we have various positions and we have Deepak Bhattacharya who sort of encompasses both views. Am I right, Professor Huban, or. Yes, correct. And now why I'm so glad about this volume and what is the unity of this volume? A part of the topic. Okay, Vatican Myths and Rituals. Because this was the call of the conference. The common thing is the team, the authors writing this because many of them, most of them are from Pune, of course, most of them are connected to Dekhand College, to the institutions there, to Tilak Maharashtra Vidyabit where I studied, to Vaidika Samsodhana Mandal. Like Dr. Sara Jurat who was coming to our conferences in the beginning, she was invading, dealing with the rituals, ritual utensils there and ritual, yes, texts. And Deepak Bhattacharya who is a scholar of Atarva Veda, but he's not from Pune, of course, he was from. Yes. Javatpur.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Yes.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

And Professor Huban who is uniting us and was so much connected to Pune and still connected to Pune. And his, yes, invited the bandits from Barshis and from other Patchalas around Pune. So this is the unity, a sort of Pune conspiracy people. And the second is Atharvaveda because most of the scholars there deal with Atharva Veda. Even if I quote Sucheta Paranjata, she was my teacher for Rig Veda, not so much specializing to Atarva Veda. She has contributed during her career to the Atarva Veda team in Pune. Because we see her mentioned here and there in the publications of Tilak Maharashtra Vidyabhi in Pune, like Dariela Bash, like Keshava Commentary. So she was also in the team, for instance. So the authors of this volume are Srikant Bahulkar who was the principal of Tilak Maharashtra Abidiyavit and a great scholar of Atharva Veda, Shaunaka Shaka, myself, who I'm a disciple of Bahul Karji, the also Dealing with an aspect of Kaushika Sutra, Swatarva Veda, Shilpa Suman, who was already mentioned dealing with some rituals of Divaha, marital rites also from Atarva Veda, Kaushika Sutra, Nirmala Kulkarni, who has article about in this volume about a comparison of the puberty rights for girls for women, which is quite rare. Puberty rights for women. It's a subject not so well discussed because in the Griha Sutras most of the rights are prescribed for the male infant. And here she prescribes, she deals with this topic. Well, if you look at her article, the main text behind her analysis is an Atharva Vedic text. It's Atharvada Prayoga Bhanu, which is not even published. It's not even. It's still available in manuscripts. Is from Allahabad. Yes, manuscript. So this is. And also going back to Rapaport, it's about performative dimension of the speech. And we have a lot in Atharva Veda because from among all four Vedas, I don't know how broad I should describe because I don't know who is going to listen to me, Rig. Veda, Veda of the prayers, no, and prizes, Yajurveda Veda of ritual performances, Sama Veda, Veda of chants and Atharva Veda. Veda of what? Because Atharva Veda, the name is not descriptive as it is for the other three vedas, Rig. It's verse, Saman, it's chant. And whatever I said before, Atharva is not descriptive at all. What is Atharva? And in addition to this, Atharva Veda has so many other names recognized by its own tradition and recognized by the other tradition. By the way, Mahabharata calls Atharva Veda the Veda of the Panchakalpins those who perform the rituals with the five kalpas. So there are so many names for these veda which is so particular. Why? Because it's all about performance. Is performance par excellence. Says for instance Kaland, scholar of Sanskrit from the Netherlands, who was an editor and translator of many ritual texts. And he was one of the best connoisseur of ritual Vedic ritual, Willem Calland. So he says about Atharva Veda. Well, Atharva Veda is performance par excellence. Why? Because the mantras are so telling. The mantras are actually actions put into verses. And the only Griha Sutra means the only manual of domestic rites of Atarva Veda and Paipalada is Kaushika Sutra. Well, this text sometimes when it prescribes the rites, the domestic rites says mantra Mantra ukta means do as it is said in the mantras in the mantras of the Atharva Veda. Because the connection between the text of the Atarva Veda Samhita and the action of the proper action of the ritual, it's so eloquent, it's so explicit. So this is what I wanted to underlie. It's so full of meanings, this volume which we gave a second life, Jan Huben and I by this re editing. So it's really worth worth reading and yes, full of meanings, full of new interpretation. Also my addition of this history of chapter of Indology in Europe I think will make the readers curious.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

Thank you. Thank you very much for sharing on this very rich volume and for giving us much of the institutional setting and backstory. We will provide links for the various institutional Enterprises and also Dr. Huben's Vimeo channel, et cetera. We mentioned. We'll provide these links in the podcast Notes it is fascinating to see the trends in scholarship, but also the trends in the systems of scholarship, the trends in the very founding and diversification of the very Western apparatus of scholarship. That's quite fascinating. And I quite enjoyed hearing about your Maharashtra conspiracy, in part because upon upon doing some Sanskrit at Western universities in my bachelor's and master's, I had the good fortune of going to the American Institute of Indian Studies at Dekken College there. I did a semester of Sanskrit there. So Pune has a very special place in my heart. Of course, you know, while it is a slightly different milieu, but perhaps overall related, my synapses kept firing on this on this sort of fantasy of my I study narrative, right? So on the podcast I don't really talk too much about my specialization or not, but narrative is my right love. And my PhD was on the Devi Makna, also known as the Durga Sapta Shatiya, moonlights as a ritual text. And I've had the good fortune of witnessing its ritual officiation a number of times. And I have this fantasy of perhaps not just witnessing it, but doing a little bit of study at some point. And you know, I have the I just had this thought experiment as I was reading over much of the introduction in some of the chapters last night, that I wonder how much of this would be applicable to the narratives of the Devi versus the ritual actions, the Vedicization of the of the narrative through the known as the Chandipatra, the Jaga Saptashati. And then on top of that there's this ritual actions of the. And the Baridana. And I mean, I mean, I just. These are. This is just, you know, we're allowed to have general and half baked ideas on podcasts. So this is not a specialist conference, but I just got to thinking about this, this really interesting interplay between narrative and ritual. And I love Devi. You feel free to comment on any of that if you'd like. But, but, but before we close what. I would feel free to share whatever comments or questions you have, but I would love to hear, and I think our readers would as well, on what might be next. You know, is there any something around the corner for you, whether that's publication wise, whether it's research wise, whether it's institutionalization? Maybe you can tell us a bit.

[Professor Jan Huban]

About that publication wise. We are working already on the editing of the proceedings of the 8th International Vedic Workshop, which took place in Paris from 17 or 18 till 23. September 2000. 2023. So it was a very rich event. Again, we had contributions from pundits as well as scholars, this time mainly scholars, and also one scholar pundit from Pondicherry, who recited also partly. So this is in preparation and it is getting finalized. But in addition, my hope is to. I have made some recordings which are very illustrative. So in addition to the published book, we will also publish some of the recitations and the discussions and the other parts which make it more, which are in fact needed in order to understand what it is all about. Otherwise it becomes all dry text. In fact, the recitation itself is the performance of the text. So it is hardly possible to distinguish ritual and the story. Because if you recite the story and that is the ritual, then the. The story is the ritual. So that is something that can. Maybe it should be elaborated for other texts, like the Ramayana performance of the Ramayana and your text, which you just mentioned. But it's extremely important not to have a broad enough model, otherwise you will not see what is going on. You will focus on one very small dimension and then miss all the others. So that is one of the next steps which we are together working on now. And I don't know whether Julieta wants to add other things are definitely also forthcoming.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

I'm talking only about our work together. So as you can see, I learned a lot. Professor Huburn is my guru and at the same time my colleague, because that is. Well, we are also bringing up another edition, a second edition of proceedings of another conference which took place in Bucharest. As your update. Yes, which is. But is more Bulky, because we have more contributors since thousands, and that will.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Be mostly, really a re edition. But this was more new elements and new dialogues are highlighted in this work. So we really consider this a new work. And it has never appeared in this form and in this configurations, in this configuration. So all the papers were a little spread up in very big volume of proceedings and in that beautiful volume, which contained also about European myths and book library studies and many other things. So it is for the first time that this book is now together, that these papers are together and are placed in this new context of a step further in the discussion of, let's say, the dialogue of theory and ritual description. And I can also add that the illustrations, they are very meaningful. They are.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

From a performance.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Of the Vedic ritual in Bakshi in one of the ashrams. And it shows. It is like the configuration, which is like. It is the familiar place for all Brahmins who practice this.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

So.

[Professor Jan Huban]

They can refer to this plan of the sacrificial area as if it is their village. In order to understand several stories, you need to know, in fact, what is that plan of the Vedic ritual? So in the picture here, you see both soma, which is one of the. Which is a substance and also a God, and also fire is also a substance and a God. And we see the creation of fire, the old technique of creating fire by. By friction, which you can do as a simple act of pragmatic act, let's say. Or it has a very profound theoretical background of the God acne descending from the wood to the reality of life of the people. So, yeah, we are definitely in a dynamic of continuing this, this study and publications on Vedic myths and rituals. And this volume that has. That other forthcoming volume, I don't know whether it should be in this podcast, but that concerns orality and writing, the place of orality in the tradition and writing. So we have this dynamism that the earlier texts were apparently mainly transmitted in an oral way, although perhaps some writing was used. And then gradually writing becomes more important. And also that writing itself has an influence on how the tradition is experienced and lived.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

Yeah, fascinating. Well, we will certainly have to have you return to the podcast for any of these subsequent future publications. Also, for those who listen to the podcast, they are well aware that I'm interested really in all sort of indic studies, indologies, certainly Indian religions, obviously publications, but also developments in the field. So we've covered new master's programs, we've covered conferences. Clearly there is a rich sort of indological, institutional scaffolding. Of this publication from all it's taking you is the auspicious Number of 18 World Sanskrit Conferences conferences to get to this new cycle. But if there are upcoming conferences or developments in the field that we can put on the radar of either an interested public or particularly the many grad students and scholars who listen, then by all means we'll have you return to cover any of these. Thank you for appearing today.

[Professor Jan Huban]

Thanks so much for having us.

[Dr. Julieta Rotaro]

Thank you so much.

[Host (possibly a podcast host or interviewer)]

You're welcome. Our pleasure. My pleasure. So we have been speaking with professor jan Hubin and Dr. Julieta Otaru on this really fascinating brand new publication, Vedic Myths and Rituals. Until next time, keep well, keep safe, keep listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating the interplay between narrative and action. Take care of.

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