symbolized by an image, but are supposed to dwell in the sky and to receive these offerings through the fire. The characteristic offerings in the pūjā rite, viz. flowers, leaves, fruits, water, etc. are not known to the homa rite, except in instances where it has been influenced by the pūjā. It has been suggested with good reason that pūjā is the pre-Aryan, in all likelihood the Dravidian, form of worship, while the homa is the Aryan: and throughout the entire early Vedic literature, the pūjā ritual with flowers, etc. offered to an image or symbol is unknown. The word pūjā, from a root pūjā, appears, like the thing it connotes, to be of Dravidian origin also. This word or root is not found in any Aryan or Indo-European language outside India. Professor Mark Collins suggested3 that the Sanskrit word pūjā (from which the root pūj was deduced later) was nothing but a Dravidian pū "flower" plus root *ge "to do" (palatalized to je), which is found in Tamil as chey, in Kannada as ge and in Telugu as che: pūjā <*pū-ge, *pū-je, *pū-che was thus a "flower ritual," a "flower service," a pushpa-karma, just as homa was described as paŚu-karma or religious service entailing the slaughter of an animal. Jarl Charpentier of Sweden derived pūjā from a Dravidian root pusu meaning "to smear," as the smearing of sandal-paste or blood forms an important item in the pūjā ritual. But the use of blood, to be smeared over a piece of stone representing a god or spirit-the blood of a sacrificed animal being later replaced by red paint like the vermilion-would appear more to be an Austric or Proto-Australoid rite than Dravidian. In any case, the pre-Aryan, and in all likelihood Dravidian, origin of this most noteworthy ritual of a finished Hindu religion, would appear to be quite reasonable to assume. In the present-day texture of Hindu culture and religion the warp appears to be Dravidian and the weft Aryan. Pūjā with flowers, leaves, and water was, so far as the first Aryans who came to India were concerned, an alien, rite, a local "native" usage, not to be approved, much less adopted, by the Brāhmaṇas and others who claimed to be true Aryans. But "Greece captured her captor". The native or local cults and creeds did not die-on the other hand the exotic homa largely became moribund, being kept up artificially among limited groups of Brāhmaṇas and Kshatriyas, and the pūjā came to assume its present important place in the religious life of the mixed Hindu people which resulted from the fusion of the Aryan and the non-Aryan. The first conscious attempt to give the imprimatur to pūjā as a rite, which is to be taken sympathetically, we find in that great work of synthesis in Hindu thought and life, the Bhagavad-Gītā of the Mahābhārata, which ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3Dravidic Studies, No. III (University of Madras), pp. 59 ff. |