The Three Surviving Recensions

A Vedic shakha is a “branch” — a particular lineage of priests who preserved their own recension of a Veda, with their own particular arrangement of verses, their own particular musical phrasing, and their own Brahmana and Aranyaka commentaries. The Sama Veda once had, the tradition says, a thousand shakhas. Three survive today.

The first is the Kauthuma recension. It is the most widely preserved, dominant in northern and central India, particularly in Gujarat and parts of Uttar Pradesh. Most printed editions of the Sama Veda — including the standard scholarly one — are of the Kauthuma text. The Chandogya Upanishad, the largest of the Upanishads, belongs to this branch.

The second is the Ranayaniya recension, preserved mainly in Maharashtra. The verse-text of the Ranayaniya is almost identical to the Kauthuma — the differences are small, mostly in the order of a few sections and in some details of the chanting. The two recensions share the same Upanishads, and a Kauthuma chanter and a Ranayaniya chanter could, on most occasions, recognise each other’s work immediately.

The third is the Jaiminiya recension — sometimes called the Talavakara, which was the name of the ancient school it descends from. The Jaiminiya is the oldest, the rarest, and the most precious of the three. It survives in only a few families, mostly in Kerala (the Nambudiri brahmins of certain villages) and in pockets of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The Jaiminiya text differs more from the other two than they differ from each other; its musical tradition is distinct, its Brahmana texts (Jaiminiya Brahmana, Jaiminiya Upanishad Brahmana) are different works, and the Kena Upanishad — short and luminous — belongs to it.

What happened to the other 997 shakhas? Some were lost when their families died out. Some were lost when patronage shifted in the medieval period and minor schools could no longer support full training. Some, almost certainly, were absorbed into the surviving three as related lineages converged on the more populous schools. The oral transmission of a Sama Vedic chant requires that two living priests overlap for long enough that one can transmit the entire repertoire to the other. When that chain breaks even once, the shakha is gone. There is no recovering it from books — the books preserve the verses, not the music.

This is why the three surviving recensions are watched, today, with a care that is almost protective. UNESCO declared the Vedic chant tradition an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2003, and the Sama Vedic chant — particularly the Jaiminiya — was one of the specific reasons given. Modern recordings now exist of the principal Sama Vedic chants from all three recensions, made over the last fifty years, mostly by Indian and Western scholars working with surviving masters. The chant is no longer purely oral; for the first time in its history, the music exists in archives outside any human throat.

It is a strange thing, that fact. A tradition that was for three thousand years held together by the unbroken voice of one teacher to one student is now also being held together by tape. The tradition’s own view is that the recording is not the chant — that the chant is still what passes, mouth to mouth, between a living teacher and a living student. But the recording is a safety net. It is the first time the Sama Veda has had one.