Finnian Gerety

The Nambudiri Brahmins of the South Indian state of Kerala transmit what
may be the oldest surviving musical culture in South Asia, a fixed oral tradition of sacred songs used in ritual (Sāmaveda). Without recourse to written notation, Nambudiri practitioners teach songs face-to-face, using their voices and a distinctive system of hand gestures to convey melodies to their students. This embodied transmission of knowledge is further shaped by hereditary and social requirements that dictate who may teach, who may learn, and in what circumstances. As a result of such strict norms for teaching, and under the pressure of broader social changes, Nambudiri Sāmaveda in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has declined to the point where only a single active line of normative transmission exists. This article presents a case study of the close bond and evolving pedagogical relationship between the aging guru (teacher) and student involved in this unique transmission, highlighting the integration of digital technology into their lessons, and examining the impact of this innovation on textual, pedagogical, and ritual authority. The “digital guru”—in the form of an archive of audio- and video-recordings—aids recall and restores a sense of authority to the transmission of Sāmaveda, and yet the living guru is ultimately a presence that cannot be replaced.

The amplification of religious sound in public spaces has become a key medium for negotiating identity, difference, and pluralism in societies worldwide. This paper explores the religious soundscape of Hindu traditions in Kerala, India by examining the role of sonic amplification in the sacrifices of Nambudiri Brahmins. While Brahmanical praxis is based on ancient liturgies from the first millennium BCE, the modern performance now incorporates microphones and loudspeakers that amplify recitations well beyond the power of the human voice. This technological shift coincides with significant changes in patronage and participation, as people from outside the Nambudiri community take a more active role in the funding, organization, and celebration of such rituals. In contrast to the private sacrifices of previous generations, the ‘amplified sacrifice’ is now carried out as a public Hindu festival with thousands of attendees and a full suite of marketing and media coverage. In this way, the local, sonic amplification of performance tracks with a regional, cultural ‘amplification’ of Vedic ritual and Nambudiri identity.

This article gives a richly annotated overview and bibliography on the oral traditions associated with South Asia's oldest texts, the Vedas. With its history extending from the late Bronze Age into the early 21st century, and its influence reaching into every region of India, vedic oral tradition is a complex cultural phenomenon, encompassing text, ritual, transmission, and performance as well as the patronage networks, familial organization, and sociopolitical status of the Brahmins.
"Vedic Oral Tradition." Oxford Bibliographies on Hinduism. Ed. Tracey Coleman. New York: Oxford University Press, June 2017. DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195399318-0184

Perhaps no sound evokes the religions of South Asia as succinctly as the "sacred syllable" OM. For Hindu traditions, OM is a central and defining mantra that embodies in its single syllable the entire corpus of revealed texts, the Vedas, as well as the transcendent holism that undergirds all reality, brahman. OM's preeminence was established quite early: already in the Upaniṣads, OM is central to Brahmanical theology and metaphysics, well on its way to becoming the epitome of mantra, yoga, and meditation in Classical Hinduism. But OM has an earlier history in Vedic texts and rituals, one that scholars have rarely addressed: Upaniṣadic OM is the crystallization of more than five centuries of ritual, recitation, and reflection. In the most ancient textual strata, OM is one liturgical syllable among others, unindividuated and unremarkable; and yet it emerges in later strata as the preeminent syllable of the Vedas, Classical Hinduism, and South Asian religions.  How did this happen? How old is OM? When and where is it first attested? Why OM from among the thousands of other sounds in the Vedic liturgies? Surprisingly, such questions about the world's most famous syllable have never been resolved—the story of OM remains to be written. This study explores a neglected but significant chapter of OM's history. Inspired by the work of Frits Staal, I argue that Vedic traditions of liturgical song, sāmaveda, were integral to OM's early development. There is music in OM: the syllable emerges from melody and song.

This article uses the gesture of "tree-hugging" as a point of departure for an exploration of ritual in premodern South Asia, specifically the Sāmavedic rite in which a singer grasps a trunk of udumbara wood (=ficus glomerata) to authorize his performance in the Soma sacrifice. Drawing on Vedic interpretations of the rite as well as similar praxis in Central Asian shamanism, I raise the possibility that this gesture of "tree-hugging" can also be interpreted as "tree-climbing," thereby encoding the prehistory of the singer's role as an expert in heavenly ascents.

This long article with accompanying photos and videos is the culmination of several months on the road in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, visiting and recording singers of Jaiminīya Sāmaveda (JSV), one of India's oldest song traditions. While scholarly literature rightly emphasizes the rarity, fragility and antiquity of JSV, this article critically examines the notions of survival and revival, concluding that most modern pedagogical lineages combine aspects of both.
Audio-visual media available here: http://finniangerety.com/survivalsandrevivals/

This study explores the emergence of OM, the Sanskrit mantra and critically ubiquitous "sacred syllable" of South Asian religions. Although OM has remained in active practice in recitation, ritual, and meditation for the last three thousand years, and its importance in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions is widely acknowledged, the syllable's early development has received little attention from scholars. Drawing on the oldest textual corpus in South Asia, the Vedas, I survey one thousand years of OM's history, from 1000 BCE up through the start of the Common Era. By reconstructing ancient models of recitation and performance, I show that the signal characteristic of OM in the Vedas is its multiformity: with more than twenty archetypal uses in different liturgical contexts and a range of forms (oṃ, om̐, om, o), the syllable pervades the soundscape of sacrifice. I argue that music is integral to this history: more than any other group of specialists, Brahmin singers of liturgical song (sāmaveda) fostered OM's emergence by reflecting on the syllable's many and varied uses in Vedic ritual. Incorporating the syllable as the central feature of an innovative soteriology of song, these singer-theologians constructed OM as the apotheosis of sound and salvation. My study concludes that OM plays a crucial role in the development of South Asian religions during this period. As the foundations of South Asian religiosity shift, from the ritually oriented traditions of Vedism to the contemplative and renunciatory traditions of Classical Hinduism, OM serves as a sonic realization of the divine, a touchstone of Vedic authority, and a central feature of soteriological doctrines and practices.

Journal of the American Oriental Society 137.4 (2017):
With The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice, Brian Collins turns mimetic theory loose on the fertile terrain of Vedic sacrifice and makes a case for the relevance of René Girard's ideas to the study of Hindu myth. It is a stimulating monograph that should appeal to scholars of comparative mythology, ritual studies, Indology, and the sociology of religion.

Across the Godavari river from one of the most famous Rama temples in India--the Sree Seetha Ramachandra Swamy Temple at Bhadrachalam--a major religious festival takes place in spring 2012 that represents the marriage of two distinct ritual traditions. Thousands have come to check out Nambudiri Brahmins performing their archaic brand of Vedic sacrifice for the first time ever outside of their home state of Kerala. The real attraction for these passionate bhaktas or "devotees," however, is the chance to see and touch the icons associated with the local temple; above all, they flock to witness the ritual marriage of the divine couple Rama and Sita, performed by local Andhra Brahmins.

Painkulam Narayanan Chakiar, a virtuoso of chakyar kuttu, enacts the role of vidushaka for an auditorium of high school kids at science camp in Calicut, Kerala. The vidushaka recites a Sanskrit verse based on the Mahabharata story of Princess Pancali's wedding, then gives a rapid-fire commentary in Malayalam, riffing and making jokes at the audience's expense.

In the parched rice paddy of Panjal, Kerala, Nambudiri Brahmins stage a 12 day ritual for Agni, the Vedic god of fire. Mantras are chanted day and night around a massive brick altar in the shape of a bird. The plant Soma is pressed and offered into the fire along with with offerings of milk and ghee. On the twelfth day, the entire structure is given over to Agni--that is, the whole thing is set aflame. People believe that the performance of the ritual will cause rain to fall from a clear sky.
This short sketch explores the sensory overload of attending such an event, particularly the sonic dimension: mantras are mic'ed and amplified across the paddy at top volume.

Republican nominee Donald Trump was recently invited to a fundraising event organized by a conservative group of Hindu Americans, the Republican Hindu Coalition. A poster from the event, which describes the group as " Hindus for Trump, " portrays the candidate in a posture much like that of a yogi in deep meditation. It shows Trump, face pointing upward and hands outstretched, rising up from a mass of red, white and blue flower petals in the shape of a lotus. Prominently displayed in the center is the Indian sacred syllable, " om, " decorated with stars and stripes. Om is the preeminent Sanskrit mantra and symbol of Indian religions, especially Hinduism. In terms of religious identity, this sign denotes Hinduism in much the same way that the star of David and the Christian cross represent Judaism and Christianity. Om has its own dedicated signin the scripts for Hindi and other Indian languages. In global culture, the om sign has come to stand for Indian spirituality in general. It has been widely adopted by practitioners of yoga and meditation.

For almost two centuries, Indologists have debated the history of the Sanskrit mantra "OM" without reaching consensus as to its origins and rise as the "sacred syllable" of Vedic and Hindu traditions. Previous scholarship has framed the question of OM's history as a matter of language, proposing explanations that are variously etymological (based on other Sanskrit words: e.g., ava 'this,' Windischmann 1834, Benfey 1848, Müller 1899; ām 'yes,' Weber 1853, Böhtlingk and Roth 1855-1875, Parpola 1981; atha 'then,' Bloomfield 1899); performative (e.g., OM is an exclamation, Keith 1912; a recitational modification of mantras, Hoffmann 1976; Hock 1991; a rhetorical marker akin to Semitic amen, Mitra 1865, Oldenberg 1919); or sonic (e.g., OM is akin to prelinguistic vocalizations, Staal 1989; naturally expressive, Otto 1932, Wilke & Moebus 2011; contains an inherited vocalic sequence, Katz 2013). For all their differences, most of these studies are alike in assuming that OM is a unitary term with a single path of origins. But this assumption is contradicted by the testimony of Vedic texts, which attest OM in multiple phonetic forms (o, om, oṃ, om̐, o-o-o-m, and so on), and codify more than twenty liturgical uses under the syllable's rubric. Departing from previous efforts focused on OM as a phenomenon of language, the present paper proposes a new approach that attends to OM's multiformity in ritual and discourse. Showing that the case of OM cannot be reduced to one overarching linguistic explanation, I argue that OM's significance as a "sacred syllable" arises from its discursive construction in Vedic prose texts, especially the Brāhmaṇas and Āraṇyakas, which fashion OM as a unitary entity by reflecting on its capacity to synthesize diverse ritual practices and thus encapsulate the authority of the Vedas in a single utterance.

Recitation and ritual are central to the roots of Hindu traditions in the Vedas. This paper addresses how mantras may have been recited and rituals performed in the first millennium BCE; and how the sonic and performative cultures have shaped the hermeneutic reflections of Vedic texts. The case study is a phenomenon with important implications for sacred sound in Hindu traditions: the emergence of the mantra OM as a "sacred syllable." Close readings of the mantra collections, interpretive prose, and ritual manuals show that Vedic OM is multiform, permeating the soundscape of sacrifice in many different ways; as such, OM is better explained in terms of sonality than language. OM did not have a single path of origins, as previous scholars have long maintained, but many parallel paths: reflecting on OM's multiformity and diffusion, practitioners constructed the syllable as a paradigm of sacred sound that reverberates even today.

While the Sanskrit scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, are widely available in manuscripts and books, many Hindus believe that the power of Vedic formulas (mantras) can only realized in performance, chanted aloud from memory by Brahmin priests. In Kerala, this authority is vested in lineages of Nambudiri Brahmins, who boast a tradition of Vedic transmission and performance going back many centuries. In this talk I focus on the aesthetics of Nambudiri performance, which are concerned above all with demonstrating mnemonic mastery over the mantras, liturgies, and rules that inform Vedic recitation and ritual. In this context, competence is predicated on precise chanting, posture, breath control, and ritual purity; to guard against mistakes, prompters guide the priests' every gesture and utterance with cues and hand signals. In this aesthetic realm, faithful replication of traditional norms is paramount, personal expression is discouraged, and audience participation is tightly controlled. Members of the public are only invited to watch and listen from a distance, perform acts of worship directed towards the performance, and make cash donations. In this way, the aesthetics of memory foster the Nambudiris' collective identity and regional reputation as living embodiments of Hindu scripture.