The Epic Genre: Indian Experience
performing spells. In the early proto-epic stages, only those episodes seemed to have found favour with the people which had potential magic qualities. The orthodox priests had to swallow them but their disapproval bespeaks of the popular base. The Taittiriya Brāhmaṇa (1:3:2:6) says that the impure portion of the Vedas became gathās and nārāśamsis. Various other minor genres had found so much favour with the people at large that the Vedic seers could not but recognise them. The rituals had to be percolated to the masses and hence some materials from the oral tradition were accommodated in the periphery of ritual texts. Thus the dialogues between Urvasi and Pururavas (R.V.X.95), Yama and Yami (R.V.X. 10), Indra, Indrāni and Vrsakapi (R.V.X.86), Sarama and the Panis (R.V.X.108), the Danastutis of the Rgveda, the Valakhilya hymns (R.V.VIII.49-59), the Kuntapa Suktas, the päriplava ākhyānas (Satapatha Brāhmaṇa xiii
- 4:3) have very little to do with the rituals. However, the Vedic
authors seemed to have invented myths and legends to justify their sacerdotal practices and custom. They drew heavily from the floating tales and beliefs of the little tradition which, as we have already stated, may be regarded as the fountainhead of the epic nucleus. Here we may also recollect that the word 'pariplava' in the Satapatha Brāhmaṇa stands for the cyclically recurrent legends which seemed to have been collected by the ancient bards for narrating them every ten days during the sacrificial year. The narrated legends were non-vedic in import but nevertheless the merits of Vedic studies were to be achieved through such päriplava sessions. The proto epic-puranic genre might have originated in a nebular form quite earlier but it was crystallizing when the compilatory and editorial activities of the Vedic poets were at the concluding stage and the ballads and legends in the oral tradition were being zealously collected. The epic-puranic formulation gradually distanced itself from the liturgical association and then finally snapped the umbilical cord to flourish independently. We may recall here that between the eighth and fourth centuries B.C. the Aranyakas and Upanişads were taking shape to signify the process of transition from the sacrificial religion to the non-sacrificial religious belief with clearly defined metaphysics. That was the time when Buddhism and Jainism origi-
