The Rishis

Before every mantra chanted in a temple, a careful priest names three things: the metre, the deity — and the ṛṣi, the seer to whom the mantra was first revealed. “Of this great Gāyatrī mantra, Viśvāmitra is the seer.” The ṛṣis are the first link in every Hindu paramparā. Families still carry their names in the gotra; the night sky carries seven of them in the Great Bear. This page asks who they were — in the tradition’s memory and in the historian’s.

They saw the mantras

The tradition does not call the ṛṣis authors. It calls them mantra-draṣṭāraḥ, “seers of mantras” (mantra-draṣṭā). The Veda is apauruṣeya, not made by any person; the ṛṣi is the one in whom it first became audible and visible. The early etymologist Yāska put it in two words:

The hymns themselves speak this way. A late hymn on sacred speech describes the first poets tracking Speech like a trail, and finding her already at home inside the seers:

So who “made” the hymns? The answers differ, and they are worth holding side by side:

The link between hymn and seer is recorded in ancient indexes, the anukramaṇīs, which list for every hymn its seer, deity and metre. That is why the priest can still name the ṛṣi before he chants — a small act of remembrance repeated millions of times a day.

The seven sages

Tradition speaks of the saptarṣi, the seven great sages. The lists vary. One of the oldest is in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (2.2.4), which names seven seers as the “seven breaths” of the head. Tap each:

• 1गोतमGotamaAncestor of the Gautama line; a run of hymns in the first book (1.74–93) is ascribed to Gotama Rāhūgaṇa.
• 2भरद्वाजBharadvājaSeer of the sixth “family book” of the Ṛgveda.
• 3विश्वामित्रViśvāmitraSeer of the third book and of the Gāyatrī — a king who, in the epics, became a brahmarṣi by austerity.
• 4जमदग्निJamadagniA Bhṛgu seer, remembered in the Purāṇas as the father of Paraśurāma.
• 5वसिष्ठVasiṣṭhaSeer of the seventh book; royal priest of the Ikṣvāku kings and, in the Rāmāyaṇa, Rama’s guru.
• 6कश्यपKaśyapaIn the Purāṇas, father of gods, demons, serpents and birds by the daughters of Dakṣa.
• 7अत्रिAtriSeer of the fifth book; husband of Anasūyā, celebrated as a model of devotion.

The Purāṇas teach that each age of Manu (manvantara) has its own seven; the Mahābhārata gives another list, of mind-born sons of Brahmā — Marīci, Atri, Aṅgiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasiṣṭha. The Ṛgveda itself is organised around such families: books 2 to 7 are the “family books” of Gṛtsamada, Viśvāmitra, Vāmadeva, Atri, Bharadvāja and Vasiṣṭha (see The Four Vedas).

Look up on a clear night and you can see them. The seven bright stars of the Great Bear are the saptarṣi-maṇḍala, and beside the star of Vasiṣṭha shines a faint companion: Arundhatī, his wife, emblem of faithful partnership. Community practice In many Tamil weddings, in India and Malaysia, the groom points out Arundhatī to the bride — aruntati pārttal, “seeing Arundhatī” — a rite the old domestic manuals already prescribe, though in city skies it is often done by gesture alone.

Tradition also ranks seers: the devarṣi among the gods, like Nārada; the brahmarṣi, like Vasiṣṭha; the rājarṣi, a king-sage, like Janaka of the Upanishads; and the maharṣi, “great seer,” a title the modern world gave to Ramana. The Rāmāyaṇa’s long feud between Vasiṣṭha and Viśvāmitra turns on that ladder: a kṣatriya king who, by fierce tapas, forces his way to the rank of brahmarṣi.

Gotra: carrying the seer’s name

A gotra (literally “cow-pen”) is a lineage that traces itself back to a ṛṣi. In the classical system, set out in the ritual sūtras, there are eight founding seers — the seven above with Agastya — and every gotra belongs to one of their families. At rituals a person recites the pravara, the names of one, three or five seers among his ancestors, so that the gods know whose descendant is calling.

The gotra mattered most for marriage: a man and woman of the same gotra were treated as siblings and could not marry. In the classical system a woman took her husband’s gotra at marriage. It is fair to say plainly that the system was built for Brahmin families and only partly extended to others. Community practice Many Tamil families outside the Brahmin communities track lineage by kulam or clan instead, and in Malaysian temples it is common for a devotee who does not know a gotra to give “Śiva gotra” at an archanai — placing themselves in the family of God himself.

Women seers

The anukramaṇīs name about two dozen women as seers of Ṛgvedic hymns, and later lists call such women brahmavādinīs, “speakers of Brahman.” Scholars note that some of these attributions simply name a woman who speaks in the hymn, but several voices are unmistakably their own. Tap to open:

In that last hymn, Speech says that she is the one who makes seers:

In the Upanishads the women question rather than chant: Gārgī Vācaknavī, who presses Yājñavalkya harder than any man at Janaka’s court, and Maitreyī, who turns down wealth for the question of immortality (both on The Principal Upanishads). The Mahābhārata adds Sulabhā, a renunciant woman who out-argues King Janaka on liberation in the Śāntiparvan. Yet the classical law books went on to restrict Vedic study to initiated men, and for many centuries most women learned the tradition through song, story and household ritual instead. The memory of the ṛṣikās is one reason modern Vedic schools have begun to teach girls again.

Vyāsa, Vālmīki, Yājñavalkya

Three later sages loom over the whole tradition. Vyāsa, “the arranger” — Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana, son of the sage Parāśara and the fisherwoman Satyavatī — is said to have divided the one Veda into four, teaching them to Paila, Vaiśampāyana, Jaimini and Sumantu, and then composed the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa treats “Vyāsa” as an office as well as a person: in every Dvāpara age a new Vyāsa arranges the Veda again. His day is Guru Pūrṇimā (see The Guru and The Mahabharata).

Vālmīki, the ādi-kavi, turned grief at a hunter’s cruelty into the first śloka and the Rāmāyaṇa (see The Ramayana). Later retellings Medieval tellings, such as the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, add that he had once been a highway robber who, unable even to say “Rāma,” was taught to repeat marā, which turns into the holy name — and sat so long that an ant-hill (valmīka) grew over him. Today the Valmiki (Balmiki) communities of north India, long pushed to the margins of caste society, honour him as their own.

Yājñavalkya is the great teacher of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and of the White Yajurveda, whose new revelation, the story goes, came to him from the Sun. A law book, the Yājñavalkya Smṛti, bears his name; historians date it many centuries after the Upaniṣad.

Agastya and Agattiyar

No ṛṣi links north and south like Agastya — in Tamil அகத்தியர், Akattiyar or Agattiyar. In the Ṛgveda he is a seer of a group of hymns in the first book (around 1.165–191), including the dialogue with Lopāmudrā. In the epics he becomes the sage of the south: the Mahābhārata’s forest book tells how he made the Vindhya mountains bow low to let him pass, and swallowed the ocean to expose hidden demons; in the Rāmāyaṇa, Rama visits his hermitage, and as the epic is commonly printed, Agastya teaches him the Ādityahṛdaya hymn to the Sun before the last battle.

Tamil tradition For Tamils he is far more. Medieval commentators made Agattiyar the first grammarian of Tamil, author of a lost grammar, the Akattiyam, a member of the legendary first Caṅkam, and teacher of Tolkāppiyar. He is said to dwell on Potiyil, the peak in the Western Ghats now called Agasthyamala. A popular Kaveri legend says the river first flowed from his water-pot, tipped over by Gaṇeśa in the form of a crow. And the Tamil Siddhas count him first among their eighteen masters; many Siddha medical texts carry his name.

Historians tread carefully. The Tamil Agattiyar traditions are mostly medieval, and scholars have read the Agastya legend as a memory of northern Brahmin culture moving south; some twentieth-century Tamil revivalists rejected him for that reason. Others see the Tamil Agattiyar as a Tamil creation in his own right. His reach was wider still: images of Agastya as a pot-bellied, bearded teacher stand in the temples of central Java, and an eighth-century inscription from East Java records the setting up of his image. Community practice In Malaysia, Agattiyar is honoured in Siddha circles and at Murugan shrines, for in Tamil lore it was Murugan himself who taught him Tamil.

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Sources & further reading

• Stephanie W. Jamison & Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (Oxford University Press, 2014) — 1.179, 8.91, 10.39–40, 10.71, 10.125.
• Lakshman Sarup, The Nighaṇṭu and the Nirukta (1920–27; Motilal Banarsidass reprint) — Yāska on the word ṛṣi.
• John Brough, The Early Brahmanical System of Gotra and Pravara (Cambridge University Press, 1953).
• Laurie L. Patton, Bringing the Gods to Mind: Mantra and Ritual in Early Indian Sacrifice (University of California Press, 2005) — on the seers and the anukramaṇīs.
• Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1998) — Bṛhadāraṇyaka 2.2.4, Gārgī and Maitreyī.
• J. A. B. van Buitenen (trans.), The Mahābhārata, vol. 2 (University of Chicago Press, 1975) — the Agastya stories of the forest book.
• Kamil V. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Harrassowitz, 1974) — on Agattiyar and the Caṅkam legend.