Note 5 — I DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN VEDIC LITERATURE

Its original purpose is obscure, but a very interesting suggestion was made in 1869 by Max Müller in connexion with his version of Ṛgveda i. 165.5 He conjectured that the ‘dialogue was repeated at sacrifices in honour of the Maruts or that possibly it was acted by two parties, one representing Indra, the other the Maruts and their followers’. In 1890 the suggestion was repeated with approval by Professor Lévi,6 who added to it the argument that the Sāmaveda shows that the art of music had been fully developed by the Vedic age. Moreover the Ṛgveda7 already knows maidens who, decked in splendid raiment, dance and attract lovers, and the Atharvaveda8 tells how men dance and sing to music. There is, therefore, a priori no fatal objection to assuming that the period of the Ṛgveda knew dramatic spectacles, religious in character, in which the priests assumed the rôles of gods and sages in order to imitate on earth the events of the heavens.