The Dialogue Hymns

The Rig Veda’s dialogue hymns are a distinct formal feature of the text and a precursor of Indian dramatic literature. They are exactly what the name says: hymns in which two named speakers exchange verses, usually arguing or persuading or refusing. There are about twenty such hymns, scattered through the corpus but concentrated in Mandala 10. Two are particularly worth reading.

Yama and Yami (Rig Veda 10.10) is one of the strangest dialogues in the world’s early literature. Yama and Yami are twins — the first man and the first woman, the only people on earth — and Yami asks Yama to lie with her, because there is no one else and the human race must continue. Yama refuses. He refuses with arguments — we are children of the same womb; our father is the same Gandharva, our mother the same Apsara; the gods watch us; the law forbids it; what is right does not change because the situation is hard. Yami presses: if you do not, the race ends with us; the gods themselves wish it; we will be remembered forever. Yama refuses again, holding his ground, naming a kind of dharma that does not bend.

The hymn ends with Yami’s frustration and Yama’s intact refusal. There is no resolution: the first humans face the first incest taboo, and the brother holds the line. Yama, in subsequent tradition, would become the lord of death — and a fair reading is that he became death’s lord because, on the original earth, he chose to die out rather than violate what he held to be right. The hymn is grim and unforgettable, and it sits in the Rig Veda as a moral set piece readers across millennia have turned over.

Pururavas and Urvashi (Rig Veda 10.95) is the romantic counterpart. Pururavas is a mortal king who has loved Urvashi, a celestial nymph, and lost her — she returned to the heavens when a condition of their union was violated. The hymn is the conversation at their meeting. Pururavas begs her to return; Urvashi explains why she cannot. The famous line is hers: there is no friendship with women — they have hearts of jackals. The line is harsh; the context is that Urvashi is, in effect, telling the king that he has not understood what their kind of being is, and that to insist on the mortal model of permanence is to lose her permanently. The hymn is the seed of the later play Vikramorvashiya by Kalidasa, almost two millennia later — the dramatic skeleton was already in the Rig Veda.

Other dialogue hymns include Indra and Indrani (10.86), the curious hymn in which Indra’s wife defends her station with surprising forcefulness; Lopamudra and Agastya (1.179), the wife rebuking her ascetic husband for his celibacy; and a number of shorter exchanges where seers debate gods or gods debate one another.

For a scientific reading, these hymns matter because they show the Rig Veda’s generic range. The text is not only liturgical praise. It contains:

• philosophical hymns (Nasadiya, Hiranyagarbha, Purusha),
• nature poetry (Ushas, the Maruts, the Frog Hymn),
• ritual instruction (most of the Agni hymns),
• military and historical hymns (Dasarajna),
• women’s voices (Ghosha, Apala, Lopamudra, Vak, the wedding hymn),
• psychological writing (the Gambler’s Lament),
• and dramatic dialogue (Yama-Yami, Pururavas-Urvashi).

That is, for a text of its age, an enormous generic range. It is part of why the Rig Veda can sustain reading on so many levels — and why a reader who knows only the philosophical hymns has met a fraction of what is there.

The next chapter is the connection forward, into the Upanishads and the philosophical literature the Veda made possible.