The Aindra Parva — to Indra

The largest section of the Sama Veda’s Purvarchika is the Aindra Parva — the body of hymns addressed to Indra. About 350 verses, by some counts, almost a third of the total Purvarchika. The proportion tells you something about the place Indra held in the soma rite for which most of these chants were composed.

Indra is the Vedic god of thunder, the killer of Vrtra (the serpent who held back the waters), the king of the devas, the warrior who keeps the cosmos open. He is also — and this is what makes him the central figure for the Sama Veda — the great drinker of soma. The soma sacrifice is, in its essential structure, an invitation to Indra to descend, drink the pressed juice, and gather strength from it. Most of the Rig Veda’s hymns to Indra are also soma-hymns; they describe him drinking, growing exhilarated, taking on the demons, releasing the rains. The Sama Veda gathered the most chantable of these into its Aindra Parva and set them to elaborate melodies.

The atmosphere of the Aindra chants is strong, exuberant, sometimes boasting. Drink the soma, Indra — you have killed Vrtra. Drink and grow strong. Drink as the rivers run. The pressed juice is ready — come, with your bay horses, do not delay. No one matches him, the thunder-armed, the soma-drinker, the killer of foes. The chants have the energy of an invitation that expects to be answered — because in the Vedic understanding, the soma offered correctly is answered, the god does descend, the strength does enter the rite and flow back out into the king who patronised the sacrifice.

The melodies set to these verses are correspondingly vigorous. Where the Agneya chants are often measured and dignified, the Aindra chants frequently move faster, climb higher, use more stobhas at the cadences. The Udgatri singing the Aindra Parva is enacting, in sound, the descent of Indra and his consumption of the offering. The chant is part of the calling-down.

Within the Aindra Parva, certain sub-groupings are worth knowing. There is a group of hymns associated with the morning pressing of soma — these tend to be the simplest melodically, often based on short Rig Vedic verses. There is a group for the midday pressing, which is the longest of the three pressings and contains the most elaborate chants — this is where the Aindra material gets its largest workout. And there is a group for the evening pressing, slightly more subdued, closing the day.

There is also a sub-corpus called the Mahanamni verses — nine ancient, particularly powerful verses to Indra that are sung at critical moments of certain extended rites. The Mahanamni belong to the Aranya Gana proper, not the Gramageya, and they have historically been treated as among the most sacred and most protected chants in the entire Sama Vedic corpus.

What you should take from the Aindra Parva is the centrality of Indra to the working life of the Vedic priesthood. Brahman is the Upanishads’ subject. Shiva and Vishnu become the focus of later Hinduism. But in the Veda itself — in the actual hymns that were chanted at the actual sacrifices for which the entire ritual apparatus existed — Indra is at the centre. The Sama Veda’s largest section is to him because most of the chants the Udgatri actually needed to know were chants that called him down to drink. The Aindra Parva is the working music of the working rite.