Frits Staal, an Amazing Indophile

Most people who have heard of Frits Staal, the philosopher and Sanskritist, know him as the chief organizer of Athirathram, an ancient Vedic ritual also called “Agnicayana” that was conducted in a small hamlet of Panjal, Kerala in 1975. I was completing my graduation and my father was retiring from service around the time keeping me tied up with future plans, lest I would have visited the place that had aroused much interest in a 3000-year-old ritual and tradition.

The “Agnicayana” rituals were documented with the help of Harvard anthropological filmmaker Professor Robert Gardner along with others like Romila Thapar and Adelaide de Menil, a photographer and an heir to the Schlumberger oilfield-services fortune. The Vedic ritual conducted from 12^th to 24^th of April 1975 was funded among others by the Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, and the Rock Foundation.

Agnicayana 1975 Panjal, Kerala

During my recent Onam holidays at our ancestral house in Cherthala, my nephew shared with me a few photos and documents that he was privy to see. His wife Ranjini is the daughter of Madamp Ravindramohan whose father Madamp Narayanan Namboodiri was a great friend of Frits Staal. Narayanan Namboodiri was a lawyer by profession and a scholar par excellence in matters of Vedic knowledge and Sanskrit. He was a Gandhian, social reformer and a Yajurvedi all rolled into one.

Frits Staal with Madamp Narayanan Namboodiri 1975

Johan Frederik (Frits) Staal (3 November 1930 – 19 February 2012) was born as the son of the architect Jan Frederik Staal and studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.

He became an undergraduate in 1948 and was adept at various classical languages. In his book, ‘Discovering the Vedas’ he had stated that three lectures that he heard in the “Tenth International Congress for Philosophy” during the year at Amsterdam fired his imagination greatly.

“The first was by the intuitionist mathematician LEJ Brouwer, the greatest Dutch mathematician since Christian Huygens. Brouwer put a long quotation from the Bhagavad Gita in the middle of a forest of mathematical symbols. The second was by JM Bochenski, a Dominican logician who was Rector of the University of Freiburg in Switzerland and an expert on Marxism. The third was by TMP Mahadevan from the University of Madras. He ended his talk with a quotation from Anandagiri: ‘An enlightened person does not become a bondslave of the Veda. The meaning that he gives of the Veda, that becomes the meaning of the Veda’.

He won an Indian scholarship to Dutch students for one year, at Rs 200 per month, and chose the University of Madras as his destination. He had spent three years in Benares as well and got his PhD from the University of Madras for his thesis on ‘Advaita and Neoplatonism’: A Critical Study in Comparative Philosophy.

Frits Staal with Madamp Shashikumar, son of Narayanan Namboodiri

This was the time when Staal travelled all over South India on his Royal Enfield bike to learn Vedic chants from the Dikshitar houses of Chidambaram and the Namboodiris of Cochin. Some of the rarest recordings of Vedic recitation and chant were made during these trips and these have been digitized by the University of California, Berkley and are preserved at the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology at Gurgaon.

The methods of learning Sanskrit at Madras and Benares from eminent teachers are mentioned in great detail by Staal in the preface of his book, ‘Discovering the Vedas’.

After returning to Amsterdam, he took up an assistant lectureship in Sanskrit at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Later he moved to the Universities of Pennsylvania and also Amsterdam as Professor of Philosophy.

In 1962, he met Noam Chomsky at Stanford and discovered that “his linguistics was a straightforward combination of Panini and logic”. Later, he taught at MIT as well for one year before settling down at the University of California, Berkley.

Throughout the following decades, while teaching at Tokyo, Kyoto and Paris, he continued his association with India and trekked across the western Himalayas that included places like Ladakh, Mount Kailas, Lake Manasarover, Peking and Lhasa.

The University of California allowed Staal to embark upon ritual studies for a decade and this enabled him to travel to Kerala frequently that culminated in the 1975 performance of the “Agnicayana” Vedic ritual.

Staal has commented that the chief result was the book, “Agni, the Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar”, published in two volumes in collaboration with the two ritual experts, Cherumukku Vaidikan Vallabhan Somayajipadu and Mamunnu Itti Ravi Namboodiri. Also, the film “Altar of Fire” was another major outcome.

Staal has paid rich tributes to the collaborators of the book at a seminar conducted at the University of Amsterdam.

He was asked to name six persons whose scholarship had impressed him the most. He first mentioned Noam Chomsky and followed it up with the names of Cherumukku Vaidikan Vallabhan Somayajipadu and Muttatukkattii Itti Ravi Namboodiri.

“Staal had learned the finer points of ‘Soma Yaga' from CV and Itti Ravi in the 1960s and the 1970s. Staal remembered with great awe Itti Ravi's knowledge of Jaiminiya Sama Veda and CV's scholarship of Rig Veda and Yajur Veda”.

Frits Staal at Panjal 1975

In dedicating the book, Agni to his Namboodiri friends, Staal had the following to say.

Over the decades, while I was beginning to penetrate the riches of their Vedic heritage, I made many Namboodiri friends and came to know them better. I found them sincere, straightforward and disinclined to take themselves too seriously. After initial reluctance, they are eager to explain the intricacies of their recitations, chants, and ceremonies; they never claim knowledge they don’t really possess; they will not preach or become pompous, and express no interest in coming to America. Though no longer adverse to modernization, they remain attached to their simple habits. Stripped of former privileges, they have preserved their ability to practice the art of living. This book is offered to them with the wish that material progress will not destroy that rare ability.

One of my oldest friends is Madamp Narayanan Namboodiri, B.A., B.L. After early training in his native Yajurveda, he took to the study of law and became an advocate. Like C.V. and Itti Ravi, he was politically active and took part in the Namboodiri Yogakshema Mahasabha, an organization concerned with the modernization of the Namboodiri caste system. Since he was opposed to animal sacrifice and refused to attend rites that involved such sacrifice, the 1975 performance was the first of its kind that he witnessed. His Gandhian attitude did not diminish his enthusiasm for Vedic culture, and this zeal, combined with a modern outlook, made him a valuable ally in bridging the gaps between my plans and reality, and between sometimes opposing factions.

Madamp Narayanan Namboodiri mentioned in the above passage was the grandfather of Renjini, my nephew’s wife.

Fritz Staal Letter to Madamp 1988. 

He also mentions Ravindran in his letter who is Ranjini's father.

Fritz Staal Letter to Madamp 1990

Staal has had his share of controversies as well. He had suggested that mantras "predate language in the development of man in a chronological sense". He also pointed out that there is evidence that ritual existed before language, and argued that syntax was influenced by ritual. (Rules without Meaning)

“Staal argued that the ancient Indian grammarians, especially Pāṇini, had completely mastered methods of linguistic theory not rediscovered again until the 1950s and the applications of modern mathematical logic to linguistics by Noam Chomsky. (Chomsky himself has said that the first generative grammar in the modern sense was Panini's grammar). The early methods allowed the construction of discrete, potentially infinite generative systems. Remarkably, these early linguistic systems were codified orally, though the writing was then used to develop them in some way. The formal basis for Panini's methods involved the use of "auxiliary" markers, rediscovered in the 1930s by the logician Emil Post. Post's rewrite systems are now a standard approach for the description of computer languages. The ancient discoveries were motivated by the need to preserve exact Sanskrit pronunciation and expression given the primacy of language in ancient Indian thought.”

His more recent study was concerned with Greek and Vedic geometry. He drew a parallel between geometry and linguistics, writing that, "Panini is the Indian Euclid."

Staal's point is that Panini showed how to extend spoken Sanskrit to a formal metalanguage for the language itself.

On conducting the Agnicayana

“Why should I, a philosopher and Sanskritist, have spent years of my life with an obsolete ceremony? Am I weary of the present? Or am I merely tired of words and meanings, and have turned to sounds and activities?

If I look at the issue negatively, this may be so, though my turning is still a turning of words. However, from a positive point of view, I have long stood in awe of this unique survival, so archaic yet so sophisticated, so close to the early history of man, and so lovingly preserved through millennia that elsewhere saw the birth and death of entire civilizations. While pyramids, temples, cathedrals, and skyscrapers were built and fell into decay, languages and religions came and went, and innumerable wars were fought, the Vedas and their ritual continued to be transmitted by word of mouth, from teacher to pupil, and from father to son. What a triumph of the human spirit over the limitations of matter and the physical body! A continuity verging on immortality—though not of any individual person. And so I found myself involved not merely in the past, but in the present and the future as well.

A curious combination of circumstances and accidents put me in touch with this venerable tradition, and then in almost complete possession and control of its physical manifestations on tape, plate, and film. The time had come for the leading Namboodiri ritualists to be willing, indeed eager, to reveal and elucidate to me these cultural treasures, which had always been hidden from outsiders. Here was a unique opportunity, indeed a responsibility, to continue the oral tradition by means of a book. Here was something for which I was so well placed and equipped that I could almost believe that only I could do it. I was fortunate and responded to the challenge as a matter of course.”

Staal married a Keralite, Ms.Saraswathy Panikker on 3^rd December 1960 at Pennsylvania. They had two children, a daughter Parvati Jeannette and a son Frederik Nanoo.

Staal's marriage invitation to Madamp

Following his retirement from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the department founder and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and South/Southeast Asian Studies Frits moved to Thailand where he built a beautiful house a little outside of the northern town of Chiangmai where with the exception of a very active schedule of travel, he lived with his long-time partner Wangchai.

Frits Staal passed away at his home on February 19th 2012 from where he wrote many of his books and papers. He is survived by his wife Sarasvati of Berkeley, California, and two children as mentioned above.

References:

1.    Discovering the Vedas by Frits Staal Penguin books

2.    Agni: The Vedic Ritual of the Fire Altar Frits Staal Asian Humanities Press, Berkeley

3.    Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Frits_Staal

4.    Obituary in the Hindu daily: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/frits-staal-an-influential-  indologist-passes-away/article2913333.ece

5.    SOAS: University of London: https://www.soas.ac.uk/religions-and-philosophies/events/comeandmeet/staal/

6.    https://alchetron.com/Frits-Staal

7.    https://vedaprakash.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-6th-vedic-workshop-2014-and-the-agnichayana-1974-75-compared/

8.    Altar of Fire-Documentary

9.    Video of Staal’s last function in Kerala on 12^th April 2011 at Olappamanna Mana

10.  http://sseas.berkeley.edu/news/johan-frederik-frits-staal-1930-2012