The God Named 'Who': An Invitation to the Rigveda's Great Questions

The hymn that could not name its god

Somewhere in the last centuries of the second millennium BCE, a poet in the Punjab composed a hymn about the origin of everything. It is a confident hymn. It knows that in the beginning there was a golden embryo, Hiraṇyagarbha, floating on the primeval waters; it knows that this being became the one lord of all that breathes and blinks, that he measured out the earth and propped up the sky, that the mountains and the far rivers are his. Verse after verse the poet lays out the furniture of the cosmos with the assurance of someone reading an inventory. And then, at the end of each verse, the confidence collapses into a single question: kásmai devā́ya havíṣā vidhema. To which god, then, shall we offer our worship?

Nine times the hymn asks it. Nine times it does not answer. The poet can describe the god who made the waters tremble and the sun stand firm, but he cannot, or will not, say the god’s name. This is RV 10.121, and it is one of the strangest documents in the history of religion: a creation hymn whose creator has no settled name, a prayer addressed to a question mark.

Here is what makes it more than a curiosity. Roughly three centuries later, the priests and grammarians who inherited this hymn could not leave the question hanging. So they answered it in the most literal way imaginable. They took the interrogative pronoun ka, “who?”, the very word doing the asking, and turned it into a proper name. The god of RV 10.121, they decided, is called Ka. Who. Griffith’s Victorian translation still carries the title at the head of the hymn: “Ka.” A pronoun had become a person. The question had become a deity.

That small scandal, a question worshipped as a god, is the best door I know into the Rigveda. Walk through it and you find not a museum of dead ritual but a three-thousand-year-old habit of mind that treated not-knowing as sacred. This piece is an invitation to that habit. We will follow the question from a single refrain to a whole theology of the unanswered, and by the end you will have a way of reading the Rigveda that keeps it alive.

How a pronoun became a person

Start with the grammar, because the grammar is the whole story. Kásmai is the dative singular of ka, the ordinary Sanskrit interrogative pronoun, “who, which, what.” Devā́ya is “to the god.” Havíṣā is “with an oblation.” Vidhema is “let us do honour, let us worship.” So the refrain reads, flatly: “to which god should we do honour with an oblation?” It is a real question with a real function. In a ritual you must direct the offering somewhere; the priest is asking which deity is the correct recipient for a hymn about the maker of the cosmos.

hiraṇyagarbháḥ sám avartatā́gre

“In the beginning the Golden Embryo arose; once born, he was the one lord of what exists. He steadied the earth and this heaven. To which god should we offer worship with our oblation?”

Rigveda 10.121, verse 1. Translation after Jamison and Brereton (Oxford 2014), with diacritics standardised. Griffith (1896) renders the refrain, famously, as “What God shall we adore with our oblation?”

Read as poetry, the refrain is devastating. The hymn keeps building a case for a supreme creator and keeps refusing to close it. But read by a later ritualist, the refrain is a problem. Ritual wants precision. You cannot pour milk toward a question. So the interpreters made a move that only a culture obsessed with the power of the exact word could make: they read ka, “who,” not as an interrogative but as the name of the recipient. The offering goes to Ka. The hymn belongs to the god Ka.

The awkwardness travels straight into the modern translations, which cannot agree on whether the refrain is a question or a name. Line them up and the disagreement is itself the evidence: the finest Sanskritists of the last century and a half have not managed to close the sentence either.

Every modern scholar hears a question; the tradition heard a name. That gap, running down the last column, is the whole drama of the hymn compressed into a table.

This is not my reconstruction; it is written into the tradition’s own apparatus. The Anukramaṇī, the ancient index that assigns a deity to every hymn, lists the divinity of RV 10.121 as Ka. The great fourteenth-century commentator Sāyaṇa glosses the creator here as Prajāpati, the “lord of creatures,” and the older Brāhmaṇa prose had already fused the two. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa states the identification directly: “Ka is Prajāpati.” The question-word and the creator-god are the same being.

Max Müller, who found the whole episode delicious, noted that the tradition went one step further and built an adjective on the pronoun. Hymns and offerings made to this god were called kāya, which he translated, straight-faced, as “who-ish.” There was, in the ritual vocabulary of ancient India, a category of worship best rendered as pertaining to Who.

Aside. It is worth resisting the easy modern reaction, which is to call this a mistake, a grammar error frozen into scripture. The Vedic ritualists were among the most precise readers of language who have ever lived; the same tradition produced Pāṇini, whose grammar of Sanskrit is still studied as a masterpiece of formal analysis. They knew ka was a pronoun. Turning it into a name was not confusion. It was a deliberate theological instrument for saying that the highest god is the one you cannot yet name.

Here is the sequence, from a line of poetry to an object of worship.

graph TD
    A["RV 10.121 refrain: 'to which god?'"] --> B["Ritual needs a named recipient"]
    B --> C["'ka' read as name, not question"]
    C --> D["Anukramani: deity of hymn is 'Ka'"]
    C --> E["Brahmanas: 'Ka is Prajapati'"]
    D --> F["God named Ka ('Who')"]
    E --> F
    F --> G["Adjective 'kaya' = 'who-ish' worship"]

Notice what this proves about the people who transmitted the Rigveda. They did not smooth the awkward question away. They preserved it so faithfully that when it embarrassed them, they were forced to deify it. That is the opposite of how most traditions handle their scriptures’ hard edges.

A grammar of not-knowing

RV 10.121 is not a one-off. Across the tenth and first books especially, the Rigveda develops what I would call a grammar of not-knowing: a set of poetic moves for approaching the largest questions by refusing to answer them. Once you learn to hear it, you find it everywhere.

The most celebrated instance is the Nāsadīya Sūkta, RV 10.129, the “Hymn of Creation.” It begins by cancelling its own vocabulary: in the beginning there was neither non-existence nor existence, neither air nor the sky beyond. It asks who could possibly know how creation happened, and then it does something no other ancient cosmogony I know of dares to do. It doubts the gods themselves.

“Whence this creation has arisen, whether it was made or not, the one who oversees it in the highest heaven, only he knows. Or perhaps he does not know.”

(RV 10.129, verse 7, after Jamison and Brereton)

Read that last clause again. The hymn climbs all the way to a cosmic overseer in the highest heaven, the natural place to deposit the answer, and then quietly suggests that even he might be in the dark. Joel Brereton, in a study of exactly this problem, called the effect “edifying puzzlement.” His argument is that the enigma is not a failure of the hymn but its entire method: the point is to bring the listener to the edge of the sayable and leave them there, changed by the vertigo. The hymn does not transmit an answer. It manufactures a specific state of mind.

This questioning register has a distinctive surface grammar. It leans on interrogative pronouns (ka, kim, “who, what”), on negations that pile up until reference dissolves, and on the verb of not-knowing. The table below gathers the clearest cases; read down the right-hand column and you can watch a civilisation practising a discipline of admitted ignorance.

Methods note. Grouping hymns by a shared rhetorical move is an interpretive act, not a fact stamped on the text. The Rigveda did not file these together; I am proposing that they share a family resemblance. The value of the grouping is that it makes a real pattern visible, but a reader should know it is a lens I am holding up, not a category the poets used.

The riddle as a sacred technology

To understand why the Rigveda treats the unanswered question as holy rather than as a gap to be filled, you have to see the question inside its working world: the ritual. In the Vedic sacrifice, the riddle was not decoration. It was a technology, a machine for doing spiritual work, and it had a name.

The brahmodya was a formal contest of enigmas staged at the greatest rituals, including the royal consecration and the horse sacrifice (aśvamedha). Two priests, or teams of priests, would trade cosmic riddles in a fixed call-and-response. One asks: what is the sun, what is the light, what walks alone? The other answers in the same coded register, and the exchange escalates toward the hardest question of all, the nature of brahman, the sacred formulation that holds the cosmos together. George Thompson, who studied the form closely, described the brahmodya as a ritualised verbal duel with strict rules: a formulaic challenge met by an equally formulaic reply, the whole thing a competition in knowing the hidden connections of things. The winner is the one who does not run out of answers, or who poses the question that finally silences the room.

The longest sustained specimen of this mode inside the Rigveda itself is RV 1.164, the fifty-two-stanza riddle hymn attributed to the poet Dīrghatamas. It is a cascade of enigmas about a wheel with twelve spokes on which seven hundred and twenty sons stand, about a single-footed and two-footed and many-footed being, about brothers who are the seasons and syllables that measure the year. Some of its riddles have clean solutions in the calendar and the ritual; a wheel of twelve spokes carrying $12 \times 30 = 360$ paired days is the year, plain enough once you see it. Others have never been solved and may never have had a single intended solution.

ékaṃ sád víprā bahudhā́ vadanti

“They call it Indra, Mitra, Varuṇa, Agni. The real is one; the inspired poets speak of it in many ways.”

Rigveda 1.164, verse 46. After Jamison and Brereton (Oxford 2014).

That half-line, “the real is one; the poets speak of it in many ways,” is probably the single most quoted sentence in all of Vedic literature, and it grew out of a riddle contest. It is the Rigveda’s answer to the question RV 10.121 kept asking. To which god? To the one reality behind all the names. But notice the form of the answer: it is still not a name. It resolves the many gods into a unity precisely by declining to say what that unity is called. The riddle is solved by a bigger riddle.

The functions scholars have assigned to this enigmatic mode are worth laying side by side, because they disagree in instructive ways.

Where they agree is more important than where they differ. None of them treats the Rigveda’s obscurity as a bug, a sign of primitive confusion or lost meaning. All of them treat it as a designed feature of a sophisticated poetics. The hymns are hard because they are meant to be hard.

Why worship a question?

So we return to the sharpest form of the puzzle. Why would a religious culture take its most uncomfortable open question and, rather than bury it, elevate it to a god? Three observations help.

The first is that the Rigveda is not a monotheism trying and failing to name its one god. Max Müller coined the word henotheism for what it actually does: it addresses whichever god is being praised at the moment as if that god were supreme, then turns to the next hymn and does the same for a different god. Agni is the greatest of the gods; so is Indra; so is Varuṇa; so, in RV 1.164, is the nameless One behind them all. In a world where supremacy is a role that different gods occupy in turn, the honest name for the highest god is not any single name. It is “whichever one,” which is to say, ka. The god named Who is henotheism made grammatical.

The second observation is that the Vedic poets thought the deepest truths lived in the connections between things, the bandhus, and that these connections were hidden by design. The sun is connected to the eye, the fire on the altar to the fire in the sky, the metre of a verse to the structure of the year. To know a bandhu was real power, and a riddle is simply a bandhu with its answer removed, handed to you as a challenge. Worshipping through questions is a way of worshipping the hiddenness itself, the fact that reality is stitched together underneath the visible in ways you must work to see. This is continuous with the whole Vedic sense of ṛta, the cosmic order that the ritual maintains but that no one fully surveys. You can read more on that ordering principle in the nature hymns.

Aside. There is a scholarly wrinkle in RV 10.121 that sharpens all of this. The hymn has ten verses, but only the first nine end in the question. The tenth breaks the pattern and finally names the god: “Prajāpati, no one but you has encompassed all these created things.” Many scholars, going back to Oldenberg’s work on Vedic textual history, regard this closing verse as a later addition, tacked on precisely to relieve the unbearable openness of the original. If they are right, then the manuscript preserves the argument in miniature: an original hymn that dares to end on a question, and a later hand that could not stand the silence and wrote in the answer. The god Ka and the answer to Ka are stacked one on top of the other in the same short text.

The third observation is the one that makes the Rigveda feel less like an antique and more like a living interlocutor. The questioning stance was not a phase the tradition outgrew. It became the seed of everything that followed. The Upaniṣads, composed centuries later, are essentially long meditations that begin where the brahmodya ended, pushing the question “what is that one reality?” until it turns inward and becomes “what am I?” The Sanskrit for that later inquiry still runs on the same interrogative pronoun. The god named Who is the ancestor of the most famous question in Indian philosophy.

How to read the Rigveda as an invitation

Most people meet the Rigveda as a wall: 1,028 hymns, an archaic language, gods they have never heard of, a translation apparatus thick with footnotes. It is easy to bounce off. The questioning tradition gives you a better way in, because it turns the reader’s own not-knowing from an embarrassment into the correct posture. You are supposed to be puzzled. The text was built for it.

Three cautions first, so the invitation is honest and not a sales pitch.

One: the Rigveda’s world is small and specific. Its geography is the Punjab and the upper Indus and the rivers of the northwest, not all of India, and certainly not a timeless everywhere. When it speaks of “the world,” it means a bounded, known landscape of five peoples, cattle, rivers, and fire altars. Keep a map nearby; it grounds the cosmic questions in real ground.

Two: translation loses the sound, and the sound is half the meaning. These were oral compositions of ferocious formal control, chanted with pitch accents by schools that transmitted them syllable by syllable for millennia without writing. A riddle in English is a puzzle on a page. A riddle in the Rigveda was a live event in a competition, sung. Read at least one hymn aloud, even in transliteration, to feel what the page flattens.

Three: resist the two opposite temptations, to make the hymns say more than they do (the pseudo-scientific reading that finds jet engines and quantum physics in the metaphors) and to make them say less (the dismissive reading that hears only primitive superstition). The honest middle is harder and more rewarding: a group of brilliant poets, working in a genuinely alien thought-world, asking questions we still have not closed.

[!TIP] A first reading path that works: open RV 10.129 (the Nāsadīya) for the great doubt, then RV 10.121 for the god named Who, then a handful of stanzas from RV 1.164 to feel the riddle in full flood. Read them in Jamison and Brereton’s translation if you can, Doniger’s anthology if you want lighter footnotes. Then go back to any nature hymn and notice how the questioning habit is quietly present even there.

Here is the deeper reason the invitation is worth accepting. Most of the world’s oldest religious literature is an answer looking for a believer. The Rigveda, at its strangest and best, is a question looking for a thinker. It hands you the largest problems there are, the origin of things, the identity of the highest reality, the limits of what any mind can know, and instead of telling you the solution it teaches you a way to stand inside the not-knowing without flinching. That is a rare and durable gift. It is why a three-thousand-year-old book of hymns can still feel, on the right evening, like the most contemporary thing on the shelf.

What the question keeps

Strip away the ritual machinery, the accents, the priestly contests, and one thing remains that the Rigveda got right in a way few traditions have matched. It understood that the deepest form of reverence is not certainty but sustained attention to what exceeds you. A culture that turns its hardest question into a god is a culture that has decided the question is holier than any answer it could invent. That is not skepticism, and it is not faith. It is something the modern vocabulary barely has a word for: a disciplined, worshipful curiosity, ṛta practised as inquiry.

The god named Ka never got a temple. He could not; you cannot build a shrine to a question mark. But he got something more lasting. He got a place at the head of the oldest hymn about creation in an Indo-European language, and he kept it, unanswered, for three thousand years, through every attempt to write in a tidy solution. The next time someone tells you the ancients were credulous, that they lacked the nerve to doubt, open RV 10.129 and read the seventh verse aloud, the one where even the god in the highest heaven might not know. Then ask yourself who, exactly, is being naive.

Open the Nāsadīya next to the Hiraṇyagarbha, read them as a pair, and you will have met the god named Who. He is the best guide the Rigveda has, precisely because he never claims to know the way.