Sayana
Also called: Sayanacharya · Topic: Studying Indian History: Sources, Dating and Historiography · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
Sayana, also called Sayanacharya, was a 14th-century Sanskrit scholar at the court of the Vijayanagara kings in south India. He wrote commentaries on the Vedas. A commentary is a long explanation of an old text, given line by line. His commentaries are the best-known traditional explanations of the Vedas. Because Vedic Sanskrit is very old and hard to read, later scholars, both Indian and European, relied on his work.
Example
In the 19th century, the German scholar Max Müller printed the full text of the Rig Veda together with Sayana's commentary. This edition helped European scholars study the Vedas.
Don't confuse with
- Sayana as a Vedic-age author: Sayana did not live in the Vedic period. He wrote about 2,000 years after the Rig Veda was composed. His explanations show how the medieval tradition understood the Vedas, which may not always be what the text first meant.
Related concepts
- Sources of history
- Archaeology
- Numismatics
- Archaeo-botany
- Underwater archaeology
- Literary sources
- Oral tradition
- Hagiography
- Kalhana
- Rajatarangini