Lifestyles of the Ṛṣi and Famous: Proto-Biographical Narrative in Late Vedic Literature

Arguably the first elaborate life stories in ancient India are that of Siddhārtha Gautama and, to a lesser degree, Mahāvīra, narrative human life-arcs that are the frame on which biography/hagiography are built by different text-producing communities. In a sense, this seems natural given that they are persona-centralized traditions where practices, goals, and doctrine are routinely tied back to that person's supposed life story and thus that life story becomes an ongoing site for meaning production. While less elaborate or totalizing, similar biographical/hagiographical trends have precedent in life stories of ṛṣis and other iconic figures in the Purāṇas and Epics. Prior to these literatures, however, scholars have been relatively silent, especially in how such stories might evolve or build across time or literatures. There are a couple of notable recent exceptions (such as Sathaye 2017 and Lindquist 2023), but these center on single figures rather than the broader literary form. This presentation will investigate early precedents for "life story" as a literary form, particularly in the late Vedic material of the brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads with particular attention to genre and text-producing communities.

In The Reality Effect (1968), Barthes theorizes the role of small, seemingly irrelevant details in narrative, what he calls "narrative luxury," as themselves functioning as signifiers of realism. Taking his lead, I propose to do the inverse. Barthes' begins with a fully formed piece of literature and examines seeming narrative ephemera; I start with an early sort of ephemera (priestly names and brief narrative contexts in commentarial literature) that are taken up and expanded into longer narratives, such as what I call "life scenes."

These "ephemera" present a true-to-life quality of a human figure and largely begin in the brāhmaṇas, ritual commentarial texts focused on the practicalities and secondary meanings of priestly actions. The scattered early references are generally taken as "historical luxury" (if I may shift Barthes phrasing) by scholars—a marker of historical realism, but not particularly relevant beyond establishing chronologies. When these named individuals appear in more developed narratives (whether in the brāhmaṇas or later texts), they are stripped by scholarship of that realism and dismissed as myth or legend (for example, Fišer, 1984). This paper begins with several early references: brief mentions of certain figures that have signified to scholars a historical veracity (such as Ruben 1947). My presentation investigates four specific figures from the brāhmaṇas, two priestly and two kingly (Janaka, Kākṣaseni, Śākalya, Aitareya), each which suggest different trajectories of authority into "life scenes" or "life story" (or, in one case, a "death story"). 

The central question addressed in my presentation is: why are the brāhmaṇas, texts otherwise concerned with ritual minutiae, the place of such biographical kernels that are expanded into more elaborate life stories (suggesting, what I call, a "biographical impulse")? I argue that a significant aspect of this is tied to a new genre that is not accorded a transhuman authority, so śākhā-based (i.e., human hieratic) authority is textually made central. These early ritual commentaries exhibit a shift in textual authority from the cosmic authority of the Vedas as śruti ("heard") to the very real lived world of human priests and their physical ritual practices (not the smṛti of the epics or śāstra, but a forerunner to it). Viewed in this light, I show how these four examples reflect different types of intra- and inter-śākha competition that place specific humans at the center. It is here that narrative elaboration of such figures into "life scene" and "life story" is used as a strategy to expand, justify, or even shift that authority. To put it another way, human-centered textual authority engendered the need to elaborate that authority through elaborating the human "life."  Thus, in the intersection of genre, literary character, and the practical needs of particular communities we can reconsider the categories of "hagiography" and "biography" as authority-producing processes.