The Goddess Who Smiles: Laughter and Smiling in the Rig Veda

Seven Smiles and No Faces

Homer gave his gods a laugh that became a proverb. When Hephaistos limps through the hall pouring nectar, “unquenchable laughter broke out among the blessed gods” (Iliad 1.599, the phrase is asbestos gelōs; Fagles’ translation is in the references)[14], and Greek literature never really recovers from the sound. A scholar of Greek laughter can fill a book with the giggles, jeers and cruelties of Olympus.[1]

Now try to find the equivalent in the Rig Veda. Take the roughly ten thousand verses, run a search for the verb smi (“to smile”), the root that gave English smile its cousins across the family, and see who is doing the smiling. The answer takes a moment to sink in. I find the verb in seven verses. In not one of them is the subject a person, and in not one of them does a god smile at another god’s expense. The smilers are the Dawn, the lightning, the cloud, the flame, the streams of melted butter, and the pair of Night and Dawn together.

That is an odd finding for a text so full of feasting, courtship and boasting. It is also, I will argue, a clue. The hymn-makers did not lack a word for the thing. They used it for an effect they could see across a valley: a sudden brightening, a face of light opening, the moment a dark surface shows teeth. The smile in the Rig Veda belongs to the weather and the sky, and it is borrowed for women only as a comparison.

Human laughter is even scarcer, and where it finally appears it is in the least likely place in the whole collection, at the end of a funeral. The rest of this article follows the vocabulary: what smiles, what is said about it, where laughter hides, and why the pattern matters for how we picture the people who composed these hymns.

Methods note. The counts come from regular-expression searches of a romanised Saṃhitā in this project’s corpus, followed by reading each hit. Sandhi hides word boundaries and the transcription has its own quirks, so treat every number as a floor. The forms asmayu (“desiring us”) and ayasmaya (“made of metal”) look like smi in a raw search but are unrelated and were discarded. For a citable census use Grassmann’s dictionary or Lubotsky’s concordance.[2][3]

The Word and Its Cousins

The root is smi, present stem smayate, participle smayamāna, “smiling”. It is one of the better-travelled roots in the family. Reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European *smei-, it is generally taken to lie behind Greek meidáō (“I smile”), English smile and its Germanic relatives, and, in the view of Watkins and others, Latin mīrus and mīrārī (“to wonder at”), which would make our word miracle a distant relative of a smile.[4] The Latin link is a reasonable reconstruction rather than a certainty, and Mayrhofer’s etymological dictionary is more cautious about the details of the Indo-Aryan side.[5] Classical Sanskrit keeps the family busy: smita is a smile, smera is smiling, and vismaya, “astonishment”, is a smile-word turned inward. Elizarenkova’s study of Vedic poetic style is the best entry to how such emotion words work in the hymns.[12]

The Rig Veda has the plain verb and little else. There is no noun for a smile in the hymns at all in my search, only participles and one finite form. For laughter the evidence is thinner still. A root has- (the ancestor of Sanskrit hasati, “laughs”) shows up in two spots that I can trust, both of them in surprising company, and a handful of unclear forms that nobody quite agrees on.

Every question mark in that last column is a real one. The vocabulary of mirth is exactly where a translator has to guess, and the guesses show up in the English: a verse that gives Griffith “laughing lightning” gives another translator a crackle.

Who Smiles: The Seven Verses

Here is the whole list, with the smiler named and the grammar noted. The detail that jumps out is the near-complete absence of a human subject, and the consistent presence of light.

Read down the right-hand column and a pattern appears. A smile is something that happens to a surface. Rain-drops catch the light and seem to smile; lightning smiles at the earth it is about to wet; fire at night smiles, and the comparison made for it is a clouded sky going bright. When the poets want a social smile, they do it through simile (the women at the assembly in 4.58, the maiden in 1.123), which is a way of saying that smiling is normally a feature of a bright face, and a bright face is found most reliably in the sky.

Dawn, who smiles at everyone

Dawn is the most frequent smiler, and she is also the only one who is given a motive. Here is the verse where it is hardest to miss.

atāriṣma tamasas pāram asyoṣā uchantī vayunā kṛṇoti | śriye chando na smayate vibhātī supratīkā saumanasāyājīghaḥ

“We have crossed to the far side of this darkness. Dawn, shining out, makes things plain again. She smiles in her brightness, like [a flatterer / an enticement], for splendour; fair of face, she has come awake for our good cheer.”

Rigveda RV 1.92.6, my translation, compared with Griffith (1896). The bracketed word marks a real uncertainty over chandas; for the standard modern translation see Jamison & Brereton (2014).[6][7]

Two things are going on. The first is relief; the verse opens with a crossing and ends with saumanasa, a good state of mind, a lightness. The smile is the visible form of the relief. The second is the little hinge chando na, “like a chandas”. Griffith’s “flatterer” follows a long tradition that takes chandas as something that coaxes or entices; the reading is not secure, and I have left it bracketed. What the simile does is make clear that Dawn’s smile is an appeal. She is courting the sleeping world.

The next hymn in the Ushas sequence is franker. In 1.123.10 she is “like a maiden” going to a god who longs for her, and she “smiles, youthful, as she shines”. Griffith’s “before him thou discoverest thy bosom” follows the Sanskrit closely enough that I will not prettify it. The smile here is flirtation, a smiling approach to the sun-god, and the hymn is happy to let the reader hear it as such; Geldner’s German and Oldenberg’s older discussion take the scene the same way.[7][10][13] Compare 1.124.7, in the same cluster, where Dawn is likened to a wife “uncovering her beauty” for her husband; the verb it uses, hasreva, is the one I flagged in the table. If hasra means “laughing” the simile adds a laugh to the smile, and if it means “gleaming” the verse is simply bright. I would not build much on it.[7]

For the sceptic’s note, here is what the hymns do not say. Dawn never laughs at anyone. She is never amused (Macdonell’s survey of her character finds the same warmth without the humour).[11] Her smile is directional (toward the god, toward the world), it brightens, and it asks for something. It is a performance for an audience, and the audience is us.

Night and Dawn together

The oddest smile is in book 3. In 3.4.6 the poet calls Night and Dawn in together as a pair, “both smiling, different in their forms”.

ā bhandamāne uṣasā upāke uta smayete tanvā virūpe | yathā no mitro varuṇo jujoṣad indro marutvām uta vā mahobhiḥ

“The two radiant Dawns [Night and Dawn], close together, are praised; and the two smile with their bodies, though they differ in form, that Mitra and Varuna may enjoy us, and Indra with his Maruts, in their greatness.”

Rigveda RV 3.4.6, my translation; the verse belongs to an āprī litany that invites each divinity in turn.

This is a smile with a body (“with their bodies”, tanvā), a pair of different faces that nonetheless look pleased, and it is directed at the three gods who will listen to the prayer. If you read the verse aloud at the actual junction of dusk and dawn, which is where the hymn belongs, the picture is easy to see: one sky wearing two faces.

Aside. “Smile” and “laugh” are the translator’s choices as much as the poet’s. Griffith renders the same verb smi as “smile” in some verses and “laugh” in others (compare 1.168.8 with 1.92.6), so anyone counting laughs in an English Rig Veda will get a different total from the Sanskrit. Work from the root, not the gloss.

Weather That Smiles

The other four smiles are quite different, and a little stranger. They are not courting anyone.

prati ṣṭobhanti sindhavaḥ pavibhyo yad abhriyāṃ vācam udīrayanti | ava smayanta vidyutaḥ pṛthivyāṃ yadī ghṛtaṃ marutaḥ pruṣṇuvanti

“The rivers resound against the wheel-rims when they send up the voice of the cloud. The lightning flashes smile down on the earth, when the Maruts sprinkle the fat.”

Rigveda RV 1.168.8, my translation, with the clause on ghṛta (“fat, ghee”) understood as rain. Griffith has “the lightnings laugh upon the earth beneath them”.[7]

The line is beautiful for what it refuses to explain. Griffith writes “laugh” where I write “smile”; the Sanskrit verb, ava smayanta, is the same smi, with a prefix that sends the action downward. The lightning looks down at the earth and smiles before the rain arrives, a tiny interval that anyone who has stood on dry ground waiting for a storm will recognise. Whoever composed this was watching a monsoon front, and the smile is the half-second of the flash.

It is also a good test of translation. Griffith rendered 1.23.12 as “Born of the laughing lightning, may the Maruts guard us”. The word underneath is haskāra, whose meaning is not settled; it could name a crackle, a roar or a laugh. The “laughing lightning” is then partly Griffith’s inheritance from 1.168.8, carried over to a verse whose own words do not require it.[7] Both lightning verses, whatever the finer sense, put a human expression on a non-human event, and we should remember that an English “laugh” is the translator’s choice.

The smile of fire, and the smile of the offering

Agni gets his own smile in 2.4.6, a verse about fire loose in a forest at night.

ā yo vanā tātṛṣāṇo na bhāti vārṇa pathā rathyeva svānīt | kṛṣṇādhvā tapū raṇvaś ciketa dyaur iva smayamāno nabhobhiḥ

“He who shines through the woods like a thirsty man; who roars like water on a chariot track. Black-pathed, burning, joyous, he is known: like the sky smiling with its clouds.”

Rigveda RV 2.4.6, my translation; Griffith has “the heaven that smiles through vapour”. The fire is also treated in Agni, the Vedic Fire God.[7]

It is hard to improve on the logic of the comparison. A forest fire, black with smoke, breaks into flame the way a clouded sky breaks into sunlight; and both look like a face doing something. The smile belongs to the breaking-through. That is the same structure we saw in the Dawn verses, only here nobody is courting anybody. The fire is simply glad to be burning.

And the last verse in the list belongs to the ritual. In 4.58.8 the streams of ghee run to the fire “like women gathering at an assembly, smiling” (kalyāṇyaḥ smayamānāso, “fair ones smiling”). The poet has the priestly language of pouring and the language of a festive crowd in one image, and gives a smile to the first by way of the second. I wrote about that hymn at length in the ghee hymn article; here the notable thing is simply that the offering, too, can be said to smile.

graph TD
    A[smi: to smile] --> B[Sky phenomena]
    A --> C[Courtship similes]
    A --> D[Ritual image]
    B --> B1[Lightning 1.168.8]
    B --> B2[Rain-drops 1.79.2]
    B --> B3[Fire as sky 2.4.6]
    C --> C1[Dawn 1.92.6]
    C --> C2[Dawn 1.123.10]
    C --> C3[Night and Dawn 3.4.6]
    D --> D1[Ghee streams 4.58.8]

The diagram is an honest summary of the evidence. Sky and weather carry three of the seven smiles; Dawn and her sister carry three; the offering carries one. Nothing in the collection, as far as the root smi is concerned, is a person on a particular afternoon being amused.

The One Place Humans Laugh

Which brings us to the exception. The tenth book contains a short sequence of hymns that handle a corpse (a subject taken up in Rise Up, Woman: Death, Yama, and the Funeral Hymns). In the middle of it, after the mourners have laid the dead down and drawn a line between themselves and him, comes this.

ime jīvā vi mṛtair āvavṛtran abhūd bhadrā devahūtir no adya | prāñco agāma nṛtaye hasāya drāghīya āyuḥ pratarāṃ dadhānāḥ

“These living ones have turned away from the dead; our calling on the gods has turned out well today. We have gone forward, to dance, to laughter, setting our lifespan longer to come.”

Rigveda RV 10.18.3, my translation; Griffith: “We have gone forth for dancing and for laughter, to further times prolonging our existence.”[7]

This is the only securely human laugh in the Rig Veda, and it is a ritual one. Notice what the grammar does. The mourners “turn away” (vi āvavṛtran); they “go forward” (prāñco agāma), which in Vedic usage points toward the east and toward the living day; and the purpose is nṛtaye hasāya, “for dance, for laughter”, a dative of purpose. The laughter is not an outbreak. It is the objective of walking away from the grave.

How are we to take it? The cautious reading is the ritual one: after the funeral rites there was a deliberate return to gaiety, and the dance and laughter were an act that told death it had no claim on the survivors. Mourning customs elsewhere often pair levity with the end of the dead person’s hold, and the verse that follows sets a boundary-stone between the living and the dead (10.18.4), which suits a rite of separation. The further inference, that the hymn records a custom of festive wakes in Vedic society, is plausible but is more than the verse itself says. Be honest about the gap: one verse, forty words.

Yet the contrast with the smiles is striking. The sky smiles to open a day; the people laugh to close a death. In both cases the expression is a sign of a threshold crossed. Neither is idle merriment.

A list of desires, and a laugh (maybe)

A second possible laugh sits in 9.112, the little Soma hymn that begins by listing what different people want: the carpenter wants a cracked thing to mend, the physician wants the injured, the priest wants a rich patron. In verse 4 comes a line whose translators disagree.

The hymn runs through its catalogue with deadpan wit, and the verse that follows ends with the frog wanting water. If the “laughing ones” are indeed in the list, it is the one place the Rig Veda admits that some people simply want company in which they can laugh, as a plain fact about wants.[7] I would not claim more than that, because the line is cryptic and I do not trust any single English rendering of it.

What the Poets Did Not Say

Silence is evidence only when the genre could have spoken. The Rig Veda is a collection of liturgical praise-poetry, and a god being mocked or giggled at would be an odd intrusion into most of it. So some of the absence is just the genre. But the genre was not a wall. The hymns contain a gambler’s lament, a frog chorus, a quarrel between a brother and a sister, an erotic dialogue between a mortal and an apsaras, and a satirical riddle in the form of a list. They contain plenty of laughing matter. The stories simply do not lead the poets to record a laugh.

Three observations seem fair.

First, the contrast with Homer is real and revealing. Greek epic dramatises the gods as a household, with all the pettiness and shared jokes that entails, and laughter is how that household bonds and how it wounds.[1] The Vedic gods are approached as guests at a sacrifice. A guest does not tell jokes at the table of the host, and the poet is the host. A culture that thought of its deities as visitors to be welcomed (a theme in the hospitality article) was unlikely to put a laugh in their mouths.

Second, the smile is a thing of visibility. The Dawn smiles because she is the one phenomenon in the world whose face, in the literal sense, anyone can see. The same logic is at work in the way the Rig Veda assigns eyes to Mitra and Varuna, a face to Agni, a bosom to Dawn. The poets built the body of the world out of what could be seen from a hillside, and a smile is a face that has caught the light; Gonda’s study of the poets’ visual vocabulary is the standard guide.[8]

Third, and with more caution: the missing human smile is probably an artefact of what survives, so I will not claim that Vedic people did not smile. The surviving poems are one kind of voice, a professional one. The laugh at 10.18.3 and the jest in 9.112 suggest that the ordinary world of dances and company stands just off the page, visible only when a ritual needs it. Bakhtin’s famous argument that a culture’s official forms and its laughing forms live in different registers is a useful, if limited, warning against reading a solemn corpus as a solemn society.[9]

A Short Comparative Detour

The Dawn-goddess is among the best-supported reconstructions in Indo-European myth (Greek Ēōs, Latin Aurora, Lithuanian Aušrinė all share her), and this makes a smile-hunt among her cousins tempting. I will resist drawing a conclusion, because I cannot verify a shared smile. Homer’s “rosy-fingered” Eos is a matter of colour, not expression, and as far as I can tell her Homeric formulas have nothing like smayate. What can be said is narrower and safer: the Vedic Dawn is given a facial expression that her Greek counterpart, in the formulas that survive, is not. For the larger picture of the family see Vedic Gods and the Indo-European Pantheon and the article on Uṣas.

How Much Did the Smile Weigh?

Why does any of this matter for a modern reader? Because it corrects a flat picture. The Rig Veda is often described as a text of fear, awe and bargaining: you give the gods fuel and they give you cattle. The smile hunt shows another register, a delight in the way the world looks, and it shows it through the unlikeliest device, a human expression lent to a non-human thing.

I find the economy impressive. A poet has about half a line to make a flash of lightning feel alive, and what he does is borrow the one expression that tells you, in an instant, that something is looking back. The dawn is not told to be beautiful. She is told to smile, and the whole sky behaves as though it has noticed you.

Here is the second thing. The verses that ask for a smile are requests for good will. Dawn smiles “for our good cheer” (saumanasāya, 1.92.6); Night and Dawn smile so that the gods “enjoy us” (3.4.6). The word underneath those requests, saumanasa, is built on manas, “mind”, with the prefix su-, “good”. The gift Dawn is asked for is a cheerful state of mind. Our own language is nearly identical: we say we are in good spirits, we hope the day smiles on us. The metaphor survives in English because the phenomenon is real, and the poets had it at the start of the written record.

graph LR
    A[Dark surface] --> B[Light breaks through]
    B --> C[It looks like a face]
    C --> D[A smile]
    D --> E[A request for good will]

Reading It for Yourself

Do this on a morning with some cloud. Open RV 1.92 before the sun is fully up, read verse 6 aloud, and wait. The line that matters is śriye chando na smayate vibhātī. There will be a moment, usually only a few minutes, when the sky behind the clouds goes from grey to a very particular warm white, and a seam in the cloud lets it through. That seam is the smile. You will have recognised the poet’s observation before you finish translating it.

Then read RV 10.18 in the evening, as a counterweight, and notice how a collection that smiles so freely at the sky is so sparing about letting its own people laugh, and how deliberately it lets them do it in the end.

If you want to go further, take the same root into the later texts and see who is allowed to smile there. In the Rig Veda the root begins its long career, and it begins with the sky.