Origin of the Indian Oral Tradition

The Indian oral tradition starts with the Rig Veda which consists of 1028 poems. ‘The Rig Veda was preserved orally even when the Indians had used writing for centuries for everyday things like laundry lists and love letters and gambling IOUs. But they refused to preserve the Rig Veda in writing,’ says Wendy Doniger in The Hindus: An alternate history. While the Rig Veda was preserved orally it was preserved with meticulous precision. Doniger adds, ‘It was memorised in a number of mutually reinforcing ways, including matching physical movements (such as nodding the head) with particular sounds and chanting in a group, which does much to obviate individual slippage.’