Compares the religious poem "Tiruvaymoli" alongside the "Vedas."

Elizarenkova, perhaps the greatest living scholar of the Rgveda and certainly its greatest linguist, explains here the relationships between a very complicated grammatical system and the peculiarities of style of the archaic religious poetry. The laudatory hymn is treated as an act of verbal communication between the poet Rsi and the deity, with the hymn itself transmitting certain information from man to god. From this viewpoint, the hymn is used as a means to maintain a circular exchange of gifts between the Rsis and their gods.

Since the publication of the Atharva-Veda by Roth and Whitney in 1856, it has been subjected to various types of studies- interpretative, historical, religious and cultural. But a comparative study embracing all the aspects of the language of the Atharva-Veda has so far remained untouched. The present work is a grammatical study of the language of the fourth Veda. Though mainly concerned with the Saunaka recenison of the Atharva-Veda, the author has also taken note of the linguistic peculiarities found in the paippalad recension. The authro has taken great pains to make a comprehensive and scholarly study of this important Hindu Scripture contributing in no small measure to the field of language and linguistics.

What this collection aims to do is to make visible the spectacular ways in which the vernacular has been incorporated into current interpretative practices. It contains practical appropriations of biblical narratives, informed by the vernacular heritage and by the reader's own identity, and spells out the theoretical aim and ambit of such an enterprise. More importantly, it tries to place vernacular reading among the ongoing critical movements of our time, such as postmodernism and postcolonialism. Though the collection celebrates the arrival of the vernacular, it is also aware of the dangers of inventing an 'idealized indigene' and of partaking in mythmaking. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Laura Donaldson, Gerald West, Thomas Thangaraj, David Adamo, Dalila Naya-Pot and George Mulrain.