Dear Asko,
thank you very much for your answer.
Yes, I have come across the explanation that the term daśaharā comes
from the words daśa + ahan. This is stated, for example, by Kane in his
History of Dharmaśāstra (but there he explains the Hindi word dasarā,
vol. 5.1, p. 194). I think that due to Kane's authority, many others
then adopt it (without quoting him).
I am not a linguist, but I do not see how daśaharā could be derived from
daśāha-. All the NIA dictionaries I have looked at (including Turner)
derive this word from daśa + √hṛ. Moreover, the summer Daśaharā is not a
"ten-day period" but a "tenth tithi".
I see that in several of your publications you derive the Hindi word
daśahrā from the unattested *daśāharaka. I do not know whether this is
linguistically possible, and whether it is necessary when we have a
well-documented Sanskrit name for the festival, Daśaharā.
But even if we allow for the possibility that the word for autumn
Daśaharā has a different linguistic origin than the summer Daśaharā, the
question still remains, how is the autumn Daśaharā explained? We have a
beautiful nirvacana for that summer festival (harate daśa pāpāni tasmād
daśaharā smṛtā), but is there something similar for the autumn one?
So I am still puzzled as to what the word means.
All the best,
Lubomir
On 19.12.2023 5:29, Asko Parpola wrote:
Dear Lubomir, the word goes back to the Sanskrit daśāha-, ’ten-day period’, a
compound of daśa- ’ten’ + ahar- ‘day’. In Vedic religion, chandoma-daśāha is the
ten-day period before the final mahāvrata in a yearly rite of ādityānām ayana
(Pañcaviṁśa-Brāhmaṇa 25,1,1.13). The term daśāha- seems to occur only in this
variant of the yearly rite, in the normal gavām ayana, the texts use the synonym
daśarātra for the ten-day period in the middle of the dvādaśāha ’twelve-day period’,
which occurs in gavām ayana before the mahāvrata without the first and last day of
the dvādaśāha (PB 4,8,5 - 4,9,19; 24,20,1). In Hindi, daśahrā- denotes especially
“the tenth day of the bright half of the month Āśvin; the celebrations in honour of
Durgā held on this day (vijaya-daśamī) as a culmination of the Durgāpūjā festival”
(McGregor, Hindi-English dictionary,1993, p. 484). In my book “The Roots of
Hinduism” (2015), p. 249 ff. I suggest that the daśahrā continues the Vedic
"tenth day” + mahāvrata.
With best wishes, Asko
On 18 Dec 2023, at 20.17, Lubomír Ondračka via INDOLOGY
<[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
I have an apparently very trivial question, but I have not found the answer in
my sources.
What is the meaning of the name of the autumn festival Daśaharā?
All the textual references I have found are to the summer festival in the month
of Jyeṣṭha. Here the name is clear: daśaharā is [a day (tithi)] destroying
(harā) the ten (daśa) [sins]. The sources mostly refer to a verse in the
Brahmapurāṇa:
śuklapakṣasya daśamī jyeṣṭhe māsi dvijottamāḥ /
harate daśa pāpāni tasmād daśaharā smṛtā // BrP_63.15 // (Gretil)
In other sources it is related to the descent of the Ganges, so we have the
bathing festival of Ganga Dussehra in summer.
If we understand the construction of the name of the autumn (Āśvin) festival in the same
way, namely daśaharā = "[the tithi] removing/destroying (harā) the ten (daśa)
[X]", what is X here?
I once read in a secondary source that what is being destroyed here is the ten
heads of Rāvaṇa. That would be a nice explanation, but I have not found any
textual source for it. Is this really the standard meaning? And is there any
textual evidence for it?
But even if this were correct, it would only explain the Rāmaistic form of the
festival, not the Śākta form (Durgā celebration).
I would be grateful for your explanations and their textual references.
Best,
Lubomir
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